Basic Black; 3207; Conversation With Alice Randall

Coming up next on Basic Black. I attacked it. I certainly have attacked it. Alice Randall challenges the Southern Mystique in her controversial book, The Wind Done Gone. I do feel that I am rebuking and scorning the text of Gone with the Wind. That's straight ahead on Basic Black. This book should have been the sequel to America's Civil War. Alice Randall may not have had that in mind when she wrote the novel The Wind Done Gone as a parody to Gone with the Wind, but that's exactly what happened. This war pitted the estate of Margaret Mitchell against Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of The Wind Done Gone.

Randall's novel sent a chill through the estate of Margaret Mitchell, charging Randall with plagiarizing Gone with the Wind. The estate eventually backed down, ending the courtroom battle. Gone with the Wind portrays Blacks in a negative light. Randall flips the script in her book by making Blacks the main characters of her story. Her novel adds to the debate over how the Old South of Slavery is to be remembered and by whom. We're talking to Alice Randall, the author of The Wind Done Gone, which is a parody of the book Gone with the Wind, and you begin a lot of press on this book. Almost too much, you might say, at times. Too much. You don't hear that very often. Well, you know, the press have come to this book in some ways because it's become a political and legal event, and it's really a literary event, and it's sort of wonderful now that people can start selling down and really taking this book into their life and heart. Talk to me about the book quickly. What is it about, mainly, and then talk to me about the controversy? Well, my book is a parody

of Gone with the Wind, and the subject of my book is Gone with the Wind, and the subject of my parody within Gone with the Wind are the racism inherent in that text, and basically the portrayal of the Black mother as having as her proper role to be the caretaker of only White children, that she should be asexual and a fertile. The idea that Blacks are intellectually inferior to White, I'm attacking. And thirdly, Miss Mitchell's idea that Black politicians are almost universally incompetent. So my heroine, Sinira, the book is told in the form of a first -person diary, arises from the pages, my pages, as the most absurd thing in the world of Gone with the Wind, an intelligent Black woman. And she tells her story of how she comes to experience her freedom, including leaving someone called R for a Black congressman in Washington. When you first read Margaret Mitchell's book, Gone with the Wind, how old were you, and what were your first impressions? Oh, you're maybe only impressions. You know, I was about 12 years old, and I was

shocked by the book, because I had never known that there was anyone who thought the Klan was a positive political organization until I read Gone with the Wind. I really had never heard, I'd never seen a print that I noticed, took note of the word nigger over and over in a book, until I read Gone with the Wind. So I was shocked by the text. I was shocked by the depictions of Mammy as an animalistic, animal -like person. Margaret Mitchell's estate had sued you, or sued Houghton Mifflin, trying to, well, first of all, not let the book get out, claiming that it wasn't a parody at all. They alleged the book was a sequel, as opposed to a parody and a criticism. They alleged that I was, as I've said, I did not seek to exploit Miss Mitchell's characters, I sought to explode them. What was your reaction, though, when initially the courts did pass an injunction against the book, didn't they? What was your reaction, then? I was shocked. was on my anniversary. It April 20th. I will never forget the day. was my anniversary. It was shocking, because it's America, and I don't know of anyone else who's had a banned book, however, temporarily.

was a very sad, sad moment. Did I say anything about the double standards that we live in? You just said you don't know of anybody else whose book has been banned, but they haven't seen other parodies, I don't know, you've probably heard of now, two live crew of the group that tried to make a parody of the song, Pretty Woman, and they went all the way to the Supreme Court. Do you think it's, when it comes to people telling their own stories, i .e., black people telling their own stories, there could be a different standard? I don't know. I'm not a legal scholar, but there was an interesting woman at Yale University, or a of Yale University Law School, the white woman who's done a study of how often, more often, the black parodies are litigated. I personally have not studied the subject, and I personally don't know it, but certainly a lot of discussion is rising right now as to whether or not there is a different standard, and certainly I'm familiar that there have been many other parodies have gone with the wind. It's my understanding that there was one done about ten years ago, bookling parodies, serious publisher, and I understand it was written by two white men, and they did not get litigated. But I can't draw any conclusions since I'm the only person I know to have a banned book.

I don't know whether it's, I think it might, it's one of my friends said, what is it, don't they want you to read? I don't think it's so much who wrote it as what's in it. And tell me what's in it that you think may scare some people. In it is a powerful political message that Margaret Mitchell's book, the book that has most influenced the American South's understanding of itself, is a racist text that is more about 1930 than 1830. I think that Gone with the Wind provides an underpinning, a philosophical underpinning for Jim Crow segregation by arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior and incompetent politicians. I noted the day that Patrick, Mr. Buchanan ran for vice, announced his candidate for vice president, an African American woman. It was her tell in Nashville, that city that evening, this joke, lots of Mr. Buchanan, I don't know nothing about being the vice president. The words of Prissy were being used as a shorthand to say blacks will assert competence where they have none. In my

parody, there is a character called Miss Prissy, and she does say something like that when a character called Mealymouth is giving birth, but this is the difference. She intends for Mealymouth to die. She knows everything about birthing babies, but she is not going to reveal it because she wants Mealymouth to die. She wants to revenge the death of her own brother. My Miss Prissy is a hyper -competent murderous. So she acts incompetent to competently achieve her goal. Which is a murder in this case. Yes, exactly. Now, how have you answered some people who may have said, you know, I read books all the time and I can decide, this is a book, I'm not going to live my life by this book, it's just gone with the wind. It an important book, but I don't necessarily agree with it. Why did you have to come out and write this book? What did it do to you, to your upbringing or to what you believed in in your life that made you sit down and say, I want to write the wind done gone? Well, I first acknowledged that the book did in fact hurt me, gone with the wind. But more importantly, I can share with you

right now, I've just come to you from visiting Atlanta for three days on book tour. I want to share two quick stories. One older lady said to me, a black woman, she said, I'm 57 years old. And when I was one of the first to integrate the parochial schools, the Catholic school in Atlanta, and she said I was given gone with the wind to read, and every morning my mother would leave my house in the darkness to go work, take a bus to Buckhead, which is the prominent white neighborhood of Atlanta. And she said the book terrified her. At first I didn't know what she was saying, then she went on to explain. And it terrified her because this woman had basically never seen the house where her mother worked, never made the white children her mother took care of. And when she read that book, she wondered if her mother felt the same way about the little children she took care of as a mammy felt about Scarlett, it terrified her. She said to me, almost exactly, your book has given me the courage to read Gone with the Wind. I still don't know whether I will, but it's given me the courage if I want to. What was your reaction when she told you that? I almost wept. I realized that she didn't in my book in a way I couldn't have anticipated. On the other hand, a man said to

me at the Saturday Night at Outright bookstore, which is the biggest independent bookstore in Atlanta, and it also happens to be largely servicing the gay community, he got down on his knees and he said, he's a white man, and he said when I was growing up, young, very attractive, very intelligent guy, so when I was growing up, how the teacher gave me, told me that Gone with the Wind the Bible were the only two books I needed in order to know how to respond to anything in life that came up. He said, I am buying this book for my grandmother to tell her that I want to be part of what is essential to the American understanding of myself, of self. He said, you have included me in this book that I was told was the only book I needed to understand how to behave, but I was excluded, he said he identified himself as being gay, so my gay identity was excluded from the book. And so again, and he thanked me for including him in the book that it meant so much to his teacher, his grandmother, and he was going to give it to his grandmother. Let's go back to the woman

in Atlanta though that told you that she was afraid to read Gone with the Wind because of her mother went to work at a house for white folks. She didn't know, and didn't want to know if this character was similar to what was in the book, because in the book Gone with the Wind, talk to us about that. When the book, Mammy, as I said, is asexual and a -fertil. She doesn't even have a black child, and she is obsessively attentive to their character Scarlett. In my book, ultimately, Mammy, one, has a name, but that woman that they talk about over and over in that whole book never even has a name. Literally, she's called Mammy. In my book, other, the white character doesn't ever have a name. Her name is other. She is the rejected self. She is just important as a pawn in the game Cynara is playing for her mother's love. But ultimately, Cynara comes to understand my character, that her Mammy mother did love her and did all she could do to protect her. Early in the book, there's a time where Cynara says it was get dressed child, talking about her, and what's my lamb

going to wear? And ultimately, at the end of my parody in critique of going to win, she understands that every time she's calling other lamb, she's indicating that she's willing to sacrifice her as need be. And every time she says child, no matter how harshly it's spoken, she's claiming Cynara as the one she truly loves. So the extraordinary reversal goes on there. And so in many ways, this is my search for Mammy. But that Mammy exists only in those pages and cannot be redeemed. My Mammy is all together different characters. She's transformed into a loving black mother who has done the best she can do. And do you feel that you, by writing The Wind Done Gone, have sort of attacked a cultural myth and this American icon that we've had? I hope I do. I hope I've attacked it. I've certainly have attacked it.

Someone said that it was as if Prissy slapped Scarlett back. And I think in a literary sense, I do feel that I am rebuking and scorning the text of Gone With the Wind. I think it deserves rebuked, deserves scorn. I think we need to come to an awareness of acknowledging even the impact that it has had. I find that for those who say that, well, you can read the book or not read it, this book has been read by tens of millions of people and too many people have just sucked in the poison along with the sweet moonlight and magnolia romance. There's a poisonous politics embedded in Gone With the Wind. Gone With the Wind, to me, is not a love story. It is a work of political propaganda that is all the more significant because it's not recognized as such. Think of the movie Birth of a Nation. In film classes throughout the United States, it is sometimes shown, but everyone acknowledges how racist it is. It's

rarely shown, say, in high schools. Gone With the Wind is still assigned in high schools throughout these United States. It's still read. It is not openly acknowledged as a racist text. Being in DC and Detroit among many Southerners, what was your experience? What were you taught about the black experience of the 18th and 19th It's interesting. One of the reasons I rebelled against the text of Gone With the Wind is I wasn't raised with it initially. It's my father, I was born in Detroit, but my father was a Malcolm X firebrand. I was raised in the prosperous part of Detroit, lawyers, doctors black, power politics of the early 60s. Motown's records was on the rise. In my world, I wasn't exposed to a of racism because I was living in almost an exclusively black and middle class or upper middle class world. Then I moved to Washington DC where we are very much in a liberal intellectual environment, the part of Washington I was in. This came as a great

shock to me because of the way I had been raised. I did not know any adults who thought the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful, positive organization. Now living in Nashville today, there are people who argue with me that the Klan had its day when it was really servicing its purposes and doing these good things and only turned bad. I don't believe that, but I do now know lots of intelligent people who actively believe that. I bet a few more in Atlanta. One of the controversies about being in Atlanta is I had a woman come up in the Atlanta Constitution reported on it extensively insisting that a black woman had gone with the wind was not an injurious text. It was just my own opinion and most black people didn't agree with me. That's what they said, huh? Yes, and it was reported in the Atlanta General Constitution as if this was a well -known fact. Well, I didn't have many other people, but that woman who was employee of the House of Margaret Mitchell's house, tell me that. But that is who they reported on and they like to maintain that mythology. How would you describe the differences that blacks and whites have had to this novel? Well, I don't want to put

all whites in the same category because I do believe certainly in the last few decades there are many, many white readers who object to the book. Well, let me back it up. How do you describe how blacks and whites have reacted to the initial book, not yours, Gone with the Wind? How would you describe that difference? I think one of the interesting things, if you are a white woman or a and you watch, if you read the book, Gone with the Wind, there are many things there to affirm your identity. Literal beauty, literal vitality, the intelligence or lack thereof of the authorial voice going through. What is there to affirm in a black woman's identity about reading Gone with the Wind? Not much. Mammy is presented as being green unattractive. As I said, not only asexual, a fertile, and Prissy is presented as being the shrill person. The black politicians are presented as being ape -like, as a word you use, goop or eaters, relentlessly compared to animals.

Black men of any dignity, there is one of my least favorite lines in the book, suggested, Uncle Peter, he is a black servant, is far too refined to even want to vote. What does that mean? I think that black readers have much to be injured by the text. White readers perhaps have found things in it that make them feel heroic reading the text. There are presentations, perhaps since I am not a white reader, I don't really know why they are so in love with this book. I find it be somewhat poisonous, but there are many white readers who find it. In fact, someone referred to Ms. Mitchell's beloved characters. As I point out, Malcolm X was in his autobiography, although he was afraid to the movie, but the entire summer it was ruined for him by watching Gone with the Wind because it shamed him. I say something that could shame Malcolm, what could it do to a lesser being? And if you don't just see it for a few hours, but you actually spend the time to read those thousand pages, how much self -hatred can you suck in with that text? And I say a lot.

I would say I think my own mother had Gone with the Wind, I think she was negatively influenced by it. I think she was never truly completely able to get out of its thrall. And did you ever talk to her about it? Some. And she is the person who took me to see it for the first time when I was younger and probably took me to the library to get my first copy of it. Did you go see the book? I read the book before I the movie, and the subject of my book is the book. Right. Because sometimes I've heard that there's been some people who have read the book, because a lot of people haven't read the book, they know about the movie, and you don't. And the book is far more racist than the movie. Because the movie took the clan out of it, literally. And they took the inward out of it. And they, because there were so many protests at the period by blacks, organized protests on behalf of black newspapers, black individuals, against the studio for even making the movie, that the studio to some degree did the quote unquote right thing, and they cleaned it up a bit. But in some ways that's made the task of pointing out the racism more difficult, more

challenging, because many times people are referring to the movie, which is in fact a much less racist portrayal. Compared to the book. Because Gone With The Wind is an American classic book, I read somewhere where you said people from this country and from other countries sometimes have asked you questions about black America, or African Americans, because if they don't know anything about African Americans, the influence has been from the first novel Gone With The Wind. I had an opportunity to ask a reporter from Tokyo that very question last week in Atlanta, NewsCree came to interview me, and I said, your average citizen of Tokyo doesn't get to, do they get to meet many African Americans? And the young reporter said no. And I said, I'm interested in asking you, because how do you think your average person that you know in Tokyo, what informs, most informs their view of the African American character? She said Gone With The Wind. Yes. Because

it doesn't just go to the history, it goes to the nature of character. It's one thing to be ignorant, it's another thing to be unintelligent. And most of the black characters in Gone With The Wind, it's not that they are merely ignorant, it is emphatically asserted that they are actually unintelligent. And that allegedly would have nothing to do with culture and cannot be changed. Do you feel that the media attention and also the lawsuit from the Mitchell Estate in a way has helped promote the book? I cannot say that, only because I do know it has been an extraordinarily painful thing to me, because it is just a truly painful idea to think that you can think and write and that your words could be banned. That we would have to go to address that issue in the law. Law and literacy among African Americans in this country is too troubled past. mean there were laws that prohibited people from teaching black people to read and write in our history. Laws that have kept us out of equal and good schools. So this issue of using and putting up legal obstacles to the reading and writing

of African, by and for African Americans is too painful an issue for me to perceive that I have any benefit from. On the other hand, I say that God works in mysterious ways. And the book has come, so I give God, I I happen to be a religious woman, I have respect for other people who are not and other people's religions, but I can only think, I do not think this is any kind of blessing of the Mitchell State of this horrible lawsuit in my opinion, but I do think it might be some kind of blessing from God. I give God the miracle of this. What does it say though too about when black people want to tell their own stories? I mean here for many years we've accepted, maybe not accepted, had, has been given to us. Suffered in silence. Suffered in silence, like that exactly. But yet here you come out and write this book and say something about it. I want to tell how we've been reading it all

the time. Yeah, kind of almost like, almost like today we hear a lot about racial profiling. You know, being a black man in America, racial profiling existed when you got your license or maybe even before that, but only now it's come to, it's come to light or people are talking about it. Well they wanted to pretend when black men used to talk about driving them black that they were paranoid and now it's become documented that there is racial profiling. I am outraged that people would try to interfere with a black woman telling the story of how she herself personally read Gone with the Wind and how I've heard from my great grand, my daughter's great grandmother and my own grandmother how they experienced the book Gone with the Wind. That this could be miscast as continuing the story as opposed to criticizing the story. My book is no way a retelling of Gone with the Wind. It is a criticism of the original telling. But it does not surprise me though, again, it

paints me that when we want our voices to be heard, that they are so often silenced and you are so encouraged to be quiet and be polite and just to do your own independent thing. Do not, their touch something of theirs. Do not rebuke their idea. And I use those terms our and their because they and their book, Miss Mitchell has a dividing line between black and white. Ultimately my book, almost all the white characters turn out to be black in my book and that's my way of inviting everybody in to the feast of this new perception and new understanding. I don't divide ultimately the world between black and white. I think we can all be included if we're willing to learn and share perspectives. But one of my most favorite negative reviews I received was from the Wall Street Journal and the reviewer who I thought was quite a cute said, it seems the operative principle on Tata when intelligence and energy was being given out if you ain't the least bit black, get back.

And he got it, he hated it, but he got it. He didn't like being treated that way. But my point is I have created a world where the rule is if you ain't the least bit black, get back when intelligence and energy is being given out. But that should make us all wonder about that other world that we have just accepted when certainly the operative principle of that world is if you ain't white you have no intelligence or energy at all. And talking to some writers, sometimes they say, I can hear the characters' voices in my head as I'm thinking about the book or as I'm actually writing. Did this happen for you? Yes, there were many times that it happened, particularly when I initially started writing the novel. It wasn't clear to me, although I was going to deal with black politicians, that Sonara was going to have the gumption to leave her, the position she had as a married woman of a prestigious white aristocrat to leave with that black congressman. And she just would not stay there with her anymore. She would just say, I'm going back to Washington. I have written her back down to

Atlanta. And that character, as I had invented her, she was going running out of that there back to Washington, whether I wanted her to or not. And I ended up loving that whole section of the book. But that was really an opportunity. Although my publisher, my editor, told me I shouldn't tell this to people, but I really did feel it was almost like the literary ghost of Mammy calling to me at different times, saying, if more than this, I felt the ghost of black women who had read the original Mammy, women who are dead already, who had read the book in 37, perhaps some of these women who had actually been slaves, they were saying, please, don't leave us on this dishonored. Do not leave us this dishonored. Is your mother still alive? No, my mother died actually last year in May. And it was interesting, because there's a section of my novel that Senora, as I said, initially doesn't know that her mother really loves her. Her mother is dying, and there's a question of whether she'll go to her or not. And I had that same circumstance. Although

my mother was sort of a political scientist in Washington, that we had a very difficult and strained relation, and then she became ill, and I had a question of what degree I would go to her or not. And so I started writing it, and then it happened to me. Do you think slavery is an issue that, as black people and as white Americans, that we deal with or deal with honestly today? Absolutely not. Although my book is not about slavery, it's about going with the wind, slavery has influenced our literal language. The tradition of African American language is a tradition of coded speech. And it's a tradition of complex speech. Patchwork quilts are used as a form of speech to point people on their way on the Underground Railroad. The spirituals, I say the best introduction to reading my book, is to sing to yourself, swing low, sweet chariot. And then remind yourself, if you wanted to get on the Underground Railroad, you should not be looking for a train track.

And if you wanted to have someone help you get on the Underground Railroad, you would not be able to put out a sign. You had to speak in the light of day and hope that some would understand and some wouldn't, so you might start singing loudly, swing low, sweet chariot, and hope that someone heard that you wanted to try to steal yourself north. There's a couple of parodies too. And when African Americans write parodies or do parodies, whether it's in literature or in some other genre, do you think there's a difference or if there's a double standard in that? And then just give me your take on African American parodies in general. That's a great question. You know, we think about the dance, the cakewalk, which I mentioned in my novel. The cakewalk is an African American parody of the perception whites have of how blacks dance and how they act. It's an absurd exaggeration of black dance performed for whites. And it's an insult to the whites, but this is what you think we do. Whites sometimes watch at the time period the cakewalk and thought it is a straightforward dance.

So our parody is their straightforward narration, but it isn't. Got you. Again, her book is called The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone with the Wind. And what is it, if your readers could take one thing, one important thing from this book, what would you want them to take from it? Gone with the Wind means good times are over, good times are lost. The Wind Done Gone means bad times are over. I want them to take from it that let us put the past in the past by completing the cultural dialogue and moving forward. Spoken well. Thank you so much for joining us on Basic Black. Thank you for having me. For questions and comments, please contact our website at www .wgbh .org. Keyword, Basic Black.

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