“The Wind Done Gone” is a slim little volume that got way too much advance publicity because the estate of Margaret Mitchell got all worked up over the very idea that the mighty classic “Gone With the Wind” could be made mock of.
Author Alice Randall ought to be downright grateful to those folks who claimed this thin sketch constituted plagiary of GWTW. Without all the whoopla kicked up by the media over the plagiary business, Ms. Randall’s first novel probably would have slipped directly into the remainder bin.
Some of the dust-jacket tributes are quite amazing though. Tony Earley, author of “Jim the Boy,” cut loose with, “If the revelation that Sally Hemmings bore Thomas Jefferson’s children has started a fire, this book helps make that fire bright enough to see by.” Jay McInerney, author of “The Last of the Savages,” found “The Wind Done Gone,” “a brilliant meditation on a modern myth, a revisionist version of our history which is utterly convincing and compelling. ‘The Wind Done Gone’ has the inevitability of a work of art.” Hmm, wonder what he could mean by that?
As for this “meditation on a modern myth,” you know the gimmick surely from all the press accounts. The story is told as snippets from a diary of one Cindy Cynara, called Cinnamon, who tells of her life at Tara – or Tata as Ms. Randall chooses to call it. Scarlett O’Hara is dismissively referred to as Other, half-sister to the diarist. The fellow who married Other and left her is discreetly identified only by the capital initial “R.” Naturally, R really loves Cynara and not Other.
The book is filled with phrases like “Planter used to say I was his cinnamon and Mammy was his coffee.” And worse, you get many a passage like: “It’s all so mixed up. I take a sip more – or is it more than a sip from Other’s brandy bottle, and my memories are like a fish in a bowl swimming one way and then another, detached, insignificant, but still I turn back to look, remember, watch, mesmerized as the memories glide past.”
R, who she begins to call Debt Chauffeur, wants at last to marry her. “He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored – except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard, and not a tear came. He couldn’t understand it. I don’t often think on how white I look; it’s always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I’m supposed to be colored.”
R marries her, but they stay in the States. She has a love affair with a black congressman who would like to marry her, but knows his career would be doomed if he did. She arranges a marriage for him with an educated young black woman, and stands as godmother to their son. She ends the diary with the phrase “the wind done gone” repeated three times before ending with “and blown my bones away.” The last sentence in the book at the end of acknowledgments is: “Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘Gone With the Wind’ inspired me to think.” But think what – that is the question.
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