‘The Wind Done Gone’--From the Scars to a Heart

I have been accused of writing a sequel to “Gone With the Wind.” A sequel--or retelling from a “black” perspective--could perhaps be written. It is not, however, what I have done.

That book--let’s call it “Uncle Tom Goes to Tara”--might maintain the theme that slavery and the Confederacy were benign institutions. It might continue the motif that Scarlett O’Hara was more attractive than every other woman and Melanie was sweeter. Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes, white aristocrats both, would be the two most desirable men in the world. Such a retelling would exploit Margaret Mitchell’s characters.

The Mitchell estate likes to say that GWTW is a well-loved novel. A sequel would exploit that love. My novel, “The Wind Done Gone,” is a political and critical parody that seeks to explode the archetypes in “Gone With the Wind” that have moved into the American imagination. My parody creates a different and radical universe, a universe in which the two most attractive men are a brilliant black congressman (who appears nowhere in Mitchell’s novel) and a black horse trainer of subtle intelligence. The most attractive woman in this universe is the ironic mulatto Cynara, a figure who does not and could not exist in Mitchell’s book. Cynara reads and writes her way into being an identity. My counterpart to Melanie is a sadistic, multiple murderer. My counterpart to Ashley is gay. Almost everybody in my book turns out to be black, including the counterparts for Scarlett, her sisters and her mother.

Quiet as it’s kept, there are people who hate “Gone With the Wind.” In his autobiography, Malcolm X has this to say: “I remember one thing that marred this time for me: the movie ‘Gone with the Wind.’ When it played in Mason, I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.”

A story that could shame Malcolm--what may it have done to weaker beings? I wrote my book for the millions of black women who feel they have been injured by GWTW--the book, the movie, the myth--which has stepped off the page and off the screen and into the crannies of private life wherever blacks and whites are found together in these United States. I wrote it for their men. I wrote my book for the millions of compassionate white women who envision and wish to love (without shame) a more complex South. And I wrote for their men.

“I don’t know nothing about birthing no babies, Miss Scarlett,” Prissy is finally forced to admit. How often is that line quoted? It has become a shorthand expression for the racist notion that blacks will assert competence when they have none. In my parody, I whip that line around and turn it inside out by placing it in a new context. Miss Priss in “The Wind Done Gone” has intention. She intends for the character, Mealy Mouth, to die. Miss Priss may or may not know something about bringing people into the world; she surely knows a lot about taking them out of it. This is a perfect inversion of the original text. It is transformative. It is the work of formal parody. I wrote with the hope of creating an antidote to a poisonous text.

My grandfather could not read or write. My father gave me two charges: “I want you to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves” and “Speak up, you’re not down South.” My Daddy couldn’t even imagine staying down South and speaking up. The Mitchell estate wants to talk about property rights, but it doesn’t own what I have seen. It doesn’t own what my grandfather saw, what he felt but couldn’t put down on paper, what he knew. It doesn’t own what my grandmother told me about her experience of “Gone With the Wind.” When I read “Gone With the Wind,” it branded my brain. What I made of that scar is my very own.

We buried my husband’s grandmother in Tuskegee, Ala., on April 4. Corinne Steele hated “Gone With the Wind.” At her funeral, several of her friends--educated, aged, black women--came up to me to talk about the controversy surrounding the book. All were supportive. One lady, a veterinarian, laughed bitterly, wisely. Understanding the dynamic of my parody, that proud woman said she would put a handkerchief on her head and come to court for me. That woman will never buy a sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” and she would have slapped me down if I had written one, slapped me like Scarlett slapped Prissy. Would the Mitchell estate seek to own that too?