Parody on Trial
Alice Randall Writing In-Sanity
By Lamaretta Simmons
 All eyes are on first time novelist, Alice Randall, and her bid to have her book, The Wind Done Gone, released from the throes of the American Courts. The Wind Done Gone is a parody of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone with The Wind, which is considered by many one of the hallmarks of great American literature about the slave south. Randall chose to parody GWTW, after years of coping with what she has termed the "racist lies and racist language" of the text.
Randall's book gained national attention when the Mitchell Trusts challenged the book's right to be published, citing an infringement on Mitchell's copyright. The Mitchell Trusts argued that Randall's book borrowed too liberally from GWTW and would inhibit licensing of any other sequels or offspring of GWTW and offered instead that Randall's book is a form of literary piracy and is a derivative work, infringing on the intellectual property rights of Mitchell.
In April, a federal judge, agreeing with the Mitchell Trusts, blocked publication of Randall's novel. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned the injunction in May, allowing for the book's publication. Despite borrowing several scenes and lines of dialogue from the original novel, Randall and her publishers insist the book is an original work of serious parody and is protected by the First Amendment.
Several academic and literary heavyweights have come out in support of Randall, including Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Arthur Schlessinger, and Ishmael Reed. Randall, though upset that the book is in legal conflict, said that the support from the literary world has been wonderful.
"It meant that people who create things understood what I was doing, that I was not stealing from someone who created. Writers understood what I was doing, and that was tremendous to me," Randall said. "I have a right to speak my mind, to speak in contradiction, to give another point of view."
Randall, who has a degree from Harvard in English Literature, was hosted by the Poetry Center on July 20 at the Chicago Historical Society, where she read from her novel and fielded questions from the audience, as part of a national speaking tour about the book, which made the New York Times National Bestseller list.
 | The Wind Done Gone: an unauthorized parody
2001, Houghton-Mifflin |
Currently, the Mitchell Trusts are appealing the court decision to allow the book to see daylight, and due to that pending litigation Randall declined to submit to an in-depth literary Q and A. But she did discuss what drove her to write the life of Cynara, a mulatto female slave, who is literate, beautiful, independent, and strong - a character who could not have existed in Mitchell's world. Many of the black characters in TWDG seem ironic, almost ridiculous in comparison to the world Mitchell created in GWTW; however, that was Randall's goal, to show that Mitchell cast blacks in a way that is not only ridiculously docile and dumb, but injurious to African American readers, and all readers alike.
"Reading GWTW was injury to me ... Writing as 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," Randall said.
Despite the leaps and bounds made in terms of racial progress and historical understanding of America's racial past Randall stated: "[Books with racist text] are far more dangerous now, because books have a way of moving from the world of fiction into the world of creating our understanding of what the reality was. That is the peculiar inherent danger of what I perceive as racist text."
Randall went on to say that she felt a need to speak out about the derogatory images of blacks in literature. "The dumb happy darkie may have only existed in literature, but now it exists in many people's minds because it exists in literature. I am not sure anybody ever met that person, but people read about it all the time, they think that person existed.
"Books that hold within them a great deal of racial stereotyping, racial misreading, racial lies, 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 a fantasy or not; but if you are living in 2001 and you read a book about an earlier period, say Mark Twain's Huckleberry 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 not saying he is or isn't, 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," Randall asserted.
One image that resonated with Randall, and one that she wanted desperately to shatter, was Mitchell's depiction of the Mammy character as ugly, fat, and asexual. Randall harbored that negative and in identifying with the weight of Mammy, actually, though unintentionally, gained weight herself. In rebellion against the idea that Mammy's weight was something shameful, Randall not only paints Mammy as much more in control of herself and her surroundings, she gives Mammy something Mitchell didn't - womanhood. Mammy is the mother of the main character, Cynara, whom she conceived as a result of a liaison with the plantation master.
"I feel that now I have written this book, I'm feeling 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. Most of this weight came on when I began writing the book, and since I've finished I feel ready to let it go," Randall said.
The Wind Done Gone takes the skeleton of characters from GWTW and changes them to create new understanding of a world during a time that even to this day is not easily understood, either in history or literature. The Tara plantation of Mitchell's creation was a place where white slave owners ruled with little resistance from their ignorant, simple-minded black property, and a world void of miscegenation, made up of pure white babies waiting in line to take their place atop the racial hierarchy. Yet, mixing of the races did indeed occur, and Randall unveils another highly plausible plantation reality by recreating a world in which the black characters are strong, calculating, complex, and yes, some are biracial, all in an effort to write into being the voice of those neglected by Mitchell.
"A really important theme to me and my character Cynara is that she needs to write her way into sanity, as well as into being," Randall said.
The plight of African American women in literature adds to Randall's determination. As she stated at her Chicago reading, one of her biggest fears concerning the legal tug-of-war over her book was that another black woman's voice was in danger of being silenced, not only her voice, but that of Cynara's also.
 | © Dennis While, 2000 |
During her Poetry Center appearance, two African American women stood and told Randall how much her novel has meant to them, and how much they respect her bravery in depicting a much different type of black character in the midst of slavery.
"As African American women readers and thinkers become critics and scholars it's wonderful and exciting to be part of this time when we are beginning to, particularly as women, as opposed to male critics, to write about our own literature and ... be our own literary critics as well as readers," Randall said.
Despite her legal battle, and she knows it is an important battle for the sake of all artists who choose to work in response or in contradiction to a previous idea or norm, Randall advises aspiring writers to write what is needed in the world, but lacking; to write what matters and what needs to exist. For Randall, that was a bit of sanity in opposition to a literary world of racial insanity.
Gone with the Wind, after being made into a movie in 1939, has become a staple of American Cinema, depicting a southern plantation and its white family through its struggles before, during, and after the civil war. GWTW, both book and movie, received numerous accolades, and the movie was voted the fourth greatest film of the 20th Century by the American Film Institute in its 1998 list of AFI's 100 Greatest Films.
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