OF White Lies and Black Truths :

Some reflections on the war of words around

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the wind

and

Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone

- Tapan Basu, Professor, Hindu College


I shall begin this paper about the battle between two books – namely Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind (1936) and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), the latter a ‘sequel’ to the former, with some observations on the status today of African - American literary discourse within the discipline of American literature. These prefatory remarks will, I believe, serve to put in perspective the issue, dramatically foregrounded by the above –– mentioned conflict of interests between a white American text and a black American text, of whether the American literary canon has been necessarily democratised by the admission into its premises, in recent decades, of ‘minority’ texts, including, most notably, a host of texts by African-American authors.

While the exaltation of many an African-American author by the literary establishment in America through the turn of the century has been no doubt a welcome development, it has been also a development fraught with certain pitfalls. The pitfalls of literary exaltation, or to use the more technical terminology, literary canonisation, have been indicated by the theorist. Aijaz Ahmad, in an essay printed in the Economic and Political Weekly in June, 1991 :

The axiomatic fact about any canon formation, even when it initially takes shape as a counter-canon, is that when a period is defined and homogenised, or the desired literary typology constructed, the canonising agency selects certain kinds of authors, texts, styles and criteria of classification and judgement, privileging them over others which may belong to the same period, arising out of the same space of production, but which manifestly fall outside the principles of selection enunciated by the self-same agency; a certain kind of dominance is asserted and fought for, in other words, and is in turn defined as the essential and the dominant.1

The process of literary canonisation, with its inevitable logic of preferentiality, is thus not a value-neutral exercise. The exercise is marked by its own politics, a politics which gets successfully obfuscated as a given canon of literature becomes naturalised into a list of the ‘great books’ of that literature. In the case of a once-upon-a-time counter-canon of literature, such as African-American literature, the naturalising tendency can be immensely disabling as it deprives this literature of the very subversive edge vis-a-vis cannonical European-American literature which had brought this literature into the limelight in the first instance. With the setting up, since the 1960s and the 1970s, of African-American Studies programs/centers/departments in the universities of the United States of America and even elsewhere, the African-American identity movement has no doubt found its moment of self-fulfillment (at least in the academic domain) but has simultaneously been relegated to one of the numerous identity movements that inhabit the ever-expanding mosaic of American multiculturalism. To put it succinctly, African-American cultural/literary discouse is now represented (and represents itself) as being distinct either from the many, many identity discourses that have of late (over the last two-and-a-half decades or so) proliferated in an academic universe (the American academy) increasingly taken up with the study of not so much the expression of dissidence but the expression of difference. In the words of Maxime Rodinson, “The ideology [of difference] always goes for the simplest solution. It does not argue that an oppressed people is to be defended because it is oppressed. On the contrary, the oppressed are sanctified and every aspect of their actions, their culture, their past, present and future behaviour is presented as admirable. Direct or indirect narcissm takes over and the fact that the oppressed are oppressed becomes less important than the admirable way they are themselves”.2

The American literary marketplace has operated in sync with these developments in the American academy. Publishers and promoters of books, not to mention book-sellers and book buyers, have all become cheerleaders of the latest African-American literary renaissance which has witnessed (perhaps not surprisingly) the spawning of several celebrity African-American writers –– National Book Award winners, Pultizer Prize receipients, Poet Laureates and, the ultimate, a Nobel Laureate too.

Amidst this climate of euphoria, reinforced by the high visibility presence of African-American cultural icons in the ‘real’ world beyond the world of books, it is indeed sometimes difficult to remember that African-American literature had its beginnings in the articulations of the most disadvantaged members of a national population, in the shape of the narratives of African slaves employed as chattel labour in the plantations of America, and that but a little more than half a century ago, African-American manuscripts, including those penned by talented writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, could not be guaranteed an entry into the literary marketplace. In this context, the not-yet-distant controversy generated by the announcement of the release of Alice Randall’s novel, The Wind Done Gone, in March, 2001, was salutary reminder to all concerned of the fact that the lines of racial discrimination dividing black from white in the United States of America remain as firmly etched today as always.

In this paper, however, I shall not focus only on the controversy surrounding the launch of Alice Randall’s novel. I shall touch upon some of the relevant aspects of the controversy before I proceed on to an examination of the battle of the books itself, that is, Alice Randall’s self-proclaimed endeavour to take on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind by writing The Wind Done Gone.

Both Randall’s novel and Mitchell’s novel are set approximately around the same span of history, the years spanning the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, arguably the most crucial phase in the history of inter - racial relations in the United States of America. Mitchell’s novel, as is well known, thrives upon white American yearning as against black American loathing for an age gone past during which blacks and whites apparently lived (at least in the American South) in a state of harmonious co-existence as slave – holders on the one hand and as house and field slaves on the other hand. As per Mitchell’s lore, it was the cooperative enterprise of the two races that moulded the Southern states (the warp and woof of the Confederacy) into a civilisation whose way of life was the envy of the other nations of the West. It was Randall’s deliberate intention to write back at Mitchell’s lore through an account of her own, foregrounding the images and issues of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that Gone with The Wind had chosen to elide. In The Wind Done Gone, therefore, Randall aggressively highlights the mulatto/bastard complexion of Southern civilisation –– Other alias Scarlett, the protagonist of Gone With The Wind, and Cynara alias Cinnamon, the protagonist of The Wind Done Gone, half-sisters, the progeny of Planter alias Gerald O’Hara by Lady alias Ellen and Mammy alias Pallas respectively, are both the by-products of miscegenation, Ellen being as much of Negro stock as Mammy. The anxiety for whitenness in all the European – American characters in The Wind Done Gone derives precisely from the fear of the blackness which insidiously lurks outside them (as the desire for trangression) and very often inside them (as the fruit of transgression) as well. The African-American characters, Pallas (Mammy) and Garlic (Pork), and Cyanara herself, are quite in control of their lives in contrast to the whites who are shown in Randall’s novel to be bumbling, fumbling parodies of what they are in Mitchell’s novel.

No sooner had the release of this African-American parodic text been announced by Houghton Mifflin Company, the Sun-Trust Bank, the owners of the copyright of Gone With The Wind and the trustee for Margaret Mitchell heirs, moved the Federal District Court in Atlanta, and sought an injuction against the marketing of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone alleging that, as The New York Times reported it, the parodic text had been guilty of “unabated piracy” in borrowing fifteen characters, some famous scenes and even a few dialogues from the original.3 (Interestingly, the copyright possession had been waived by the Margaret Mitchell estate, in 1990, in the sanction accorded by it to Alexandra Ripley, a white woman, to author the authorised sequel to Gone With The Wind, eventually brought out under the title Scarlett). The plea for a ban on the marketing of The Wind Done Gone by the copyright owners of Gone with the Wind was upheld by the District Court presided over by Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr, but later struck down by the Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, enabling the marketing of the text from June, 2001. In the application to the Appeals Court for removal of the District Court Order, Houghton Mifflin Company maintained that Randall needed to build upon Mitchell’s plot to counter Mitchell’s vision effectively, “to undermine its myths and make readers question its word.”4 Furthur, the company attempted to interpret this matter as a matter of the right to freedom of expression guaranteed to every citizen of the United States of America under the First Amendment to the country’s constitution.

The matter of safeguarding the First Amendment attracted many, many well-known literary figures including Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Charles Johnson, Harper Lee, Shelby Foote and Nell Irvin Painter who signed a joint declaration of solidarity with Houghton Mifflin Company. In the opinion of the signatories.

The discussion of the painful legacy of slavery is ongoing among American citizens across the nation... Because of the extraordinary popularity of Gone With the Wind and its unique mythic status, Mitchells’ novel has become a prime source of knowledge about plantation life for much of mainstream America. Now is the time for the American public to hear another perspective on this legacy.5

The “unique mythic status” and “extraordinary popularity” of Gone With The Wind referred to by the signatories was certainly no exaggeration. Since the inception, within a few years of each other of the book and the film versions of Gone With the Wind (1936 and 1939 respectively), Gone With the Wind has been consumed by more than one hundred million people, its dialogues, scenes and characters have continued to hold sway over the popular imagination, at least in the West, to the extent of becoming part and parcel of Western folk-consciousness, and its title itself has acquired cultural significance far in excess of its literal signification.

It is the hegemonic influence of the text on an enormous number of readers that makes a deconstructive exercise on it, such as that of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, so very important, according to critics like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Pat Conroy, both of whom submitted individual affadavits in defense of the parody by Randall. “Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is a parody and a grand send-off of Gone With The Wind”, wrote Conroy. “She is uncommonly talented and great welcome to American letters. If you censor her work, then Saturday Night Live has no right to exist, nor does any comic strip, or late-night T.V. show, or any writer who makes fun of another writer...”6. Gates Jr. remarked in the same vein, “Scholars have long established that parody is at the heart of African-American expression, because it is a creative mechanism for the exercise of political speech, sentiment and commentary on behalf of people who feel themselves oppressed or marginalised and wish to protest the conditions of oppression or marginalisation. The African-American tradition abounds with examples of parody, and The Wind Done Gone is only the most recent example of a long and humorous tradition”.7

The defence of parody was not new to Gates Jr. In his 1988 classic called The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Gates Jr. has affirmed that the essence of African-American writing is its parodic dimension.

Black writers.... learn to write by reading literature, especially the canonical texts of the Western tradition. Consequently black texts resemble other, Western texts. These black texts employ many of the conventions of literary form that comprise the Western tradition. Black literature shares much with far more than it differs from, the Western textual tradition, primarily as registered in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. But black formal repitition always repeats with a difference, a black difference that manifests itself in specific language use...8.

Gates Jr. designates this revisionary practice as “signifyin.”9

The revisionary impulse is apparent in The Wind Done Gone, not only in the title, but also throughout Randall’s narrative. The narrative begins with a testimony to the importance of writing (re-writing) for the African-American subject.

Today is the anniversary of my birth. I have twenty-eight years. This diary and pen I am writing with are the best gifts I got –– except may be my cake.10

But the revisionary impulse is not limited to “specific language use” alone.

Randall’s re-writing project in the The Wind Done Gone covers all aspects of Gone With The Wind. She was deeply disturbed, as she told an audience at the Chicago Historical Society on July 20, 2001, by Mitchell’s mis-writing of Southern history of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, “Reading Gone With The Wind was an injury to me...” Her efforts to heal the wound prompted her into the re-writing project.

...Writing as a therapy is a theme of my book and a theme of my life. The other half of that theme is that reading can be injury...11

The injuriousness of Gone With the Wind was spelt out by her on numerous occasions. Answering questions from an interviewer in the wake of the legal tussle with the Sun-Trust Bank, she said that the South depicted by Mitchell is a South.

without miscegenation, without whippings, without families sold apart, without blacks striving for their education.

In other words, she said, “Gone With The Wind depicts a South that never existed”.12 At the Chicago Historical Society function, she dubbed the book as a dangerous production,

far more dangerous now because books have a way of moving from the world of unreality into the world of creating our understanding of what I perceive to be a racist text.13

In her opinion

Books that hold within them a great deal of racial lies, racial misreading, racial stereotyping, are far more dangerous out of the time period in which they were written than in the time period in which they were written. If you were living in 1937 when a book was published that was racist, that provided stereotypes of black women, you had opportunity to know other black women of that time period and have a sense of whether the book was true or not, whether it was fantasy or not; but if you are living in 2001 and you read a book about an earlier period, say Mark Twain’s Hucklebury Finn, for good or for bad, Jim is what a lot of people know of a black man of that time period. Jim could be a complete fantasy, I am saying that he has come to represent the enslaved man looking to freedom in the minds of many Americans and many people over the world.14

In her own “text-on-text response”15 to the racism she detected in Gone With The Wind –– Mitchell’s inability to describe African-Americans as agents of their destinies –– Randall interposes the absent African-American agents of Mitchell’s narrative into the narrative, with highly startling results. With most of the primary agents of Mitchell’s narrative, Gerald, Ellen, Melanie and Scarlett, all white of course, either dead or dying, the African-American survivors, Pallas alias Mammy, Garlic alias Park, Miss Priss alias Prissy and Cyanara, the narrator, occupy centre-stage in Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. But if these invisible or less visible presences in Gone With The Wind have at last come into their own, Randall makes explicit that this is not because of the passing away of their white mentors. Rather, in Randall’s interpretation of events it is Garlic and Pallas who have all along “owned” Tata (Tara’s substitute name in The Wind Done Gone), each of them having manipulated situations so as to secure the inept reign of the loveless couple, Lady and Planter, over the prize plantation. Garlic had swapped his old master for his new master by judiciously lacing the white men’s drinks during a gambling game and cleverly casting his lot with the goofy Planter. Ellen, forlorn after the loss of her fiancee Feeleepe, had been persuaded to wed the Irish immigrant farmar, “a man on a lonely plot, a man with no people”,16 by Pallas, her nurse, who saw in this match the path to her own empowerment. The triumphant saga of Pallas and Garlic, the ‘chronicle’ of their capture of Tata, is recounted to Cyanara by the not-to-be-put-down Garlic after Pallas’ remains have been interred forever.

Mammy and me rode wid ‘ em up country. It was me and Mammy up front with Lady and Planter behind.17

It was Mammy who had ruthlessly snuffed the life out of each of the three sons of Planter and Lady soon after each was born.

What should we done with a sober white man on this farm?18

If the fate of her brothers had not been visited upon Other, it was because Mammy “used her, used her to torment white men.”

Other was Mammy’s revenge on a world of white men who would not marry her dark self and who had not loved her lady. Did Other see how she had been weaned to pick up hearts and trained to dash them down, both with casual ease? Who convinced her to conquer?19

Mammy could not but have been pleased to see Other meet her nemesis in R alias Rhett. Had not Rhett alias R deserted Other to court Cyanara who was Mammy’s own flesh and blood?

Randall’s Mammy, is anything except Mitchell’s Mammy. In Gone With the Wind, Mammy is imagined to be “the faithful black slave who persists as a faithful black slave in spite of the official abolition of slavery and the stark reality that most slaves on the most Southern planatation have now pronounced themselves emancipated.” 20 The re-imagined Mammy of The Wind Done Gone is redeemed from such selfless servitude. The spectacle of a Mammy who has not attractiveness of either mind or body and who is defined essentially by her elephantine proportions had outraged Randall after she had read Gone With The Wind. After writing The Wind Done Gone, she felt

.... less like I need to hold on and identify with Mammy’s weight, and I feel that I am ready to let that go, now that I’ve had my say about it.... I had to protest that image, and I think it was much healthier for me to protest in words on paper...21

Mammy’s subversiveness in The Wind Done Gone is paralleled by the subversiveness of Garlic, the ‘faithful’ valet to the master he has selected from among two to serve. Garlic’s master, it turns out, has been no more than a puppet on a string, dancing to the tune of Garlic, the puppeteer. It was Garlic who

chose to work for Planter because Planter was an impotent man... Planter was a man without position or land who Garlic manipulated with his black hands into winning his land and position from another white man in a card game. Garlic the poisoner.22

But the most noteworthy tale is that of Cyanara herself, the teller of the tale in The Wind Done Gone. Written out of existence by Mitchell in Gone With the Wind Cyanara is elevated to the pedestal of the protagonist in The Wind Done Gone by Randall. In Gone With the Wind blacks and whites inhabit discrete and disparate zones in society, notwithstanding the touted amity in inter-racial equations. Cynara’s sheer existence destabilises the balance of forces in the Southern ‘idyll’ by introducing the possibilities of duplicity, hybridity and liminality into this straitjacketed environment. The rags-to-riches rise of Cyanara, via R., her lover and the husband of her half-sister, Other, further rolls the Mitchell planet upside down, while Randall revels in the fall of the mighty Southern ‘civilisation’ of yore.

Cyanara proves to be shrewder still to Garlic and Mammy in promoting her own interests. Having achieved upward social mobility through her liasion with R., she deserts him in favour of a member of the Congress of the United States of America who happens to be a person of color. Through the social network of the Congress member, Cynara learns to hob-nob with the elite of Washington D.C. Although she ultimately cannot marry her black mentor (being publicly recognised as R.’s mistress), she bears him a surrogate baby with his consent and that of his wife (his wife being infertile). This baby’s baby, the postscript to The Wind Done Gone proudly proclaims, grows up to be (like his grandfather) a Congressman too.

The Congressman’s son, Cyrus the second, never made it back to Congress, but his grandson, Cyrus the third, did. Today Cyrus represents a district near Memphis in Tennessee. He married a Nashville girl who practises law to support her horseback riding. They named their first-born son Cyrus, Cyrus the fourth, but added Jeems in honor of one of her ancestors who had helped train the first American grand national champion. Little Jeems, as he is called, has his eyes on the White House.23

The America of the future, as Randall sees it, unambiguously belongs to the people of color, to the mongrel races and to the mixed breeds. Correspondingly, the dictum of racial purity –– ‘... one drop of blackness in the entire body of a man makes him black’ – that dictated the past of America must stand invalidated.

All said and done, the face-off between Alice Randall and Margaret Mitchell, between Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone epitomised the conflict about, as Toni Morrison was to sum it up, “Who controls how history is imagined? Who gets to say what slavery was like for the slaves?24