The 'Wind' Mill

Image credit: The Wind Done Gone: Anthony Verde

'DONE' GOOD Randall's book is No. 11 on the New York Times best-seller list

So naturally, the prospect of this woman reading her book -- a book about ''GWTW'' being ''Jim Crow propaganda'' -- at the enshrined Tudor Revival mansion where Margaret Mitchell rented an apartment and wrote her own book, had the makings of a lively event. Further, there was the Randall piece in that day's Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoting Mary Rose Taylor, the Mitchell House's executive director, who'd ''gotten hate calls from both sides.'' The storm around ''The Wind Done Gone'' isn't actually on the level of a postmodern intellectual-property debate, but rather occurs in some hot zone where Reconstruction history and deconstructionist theory converge. Not that the reading got off to such an exciting start. First, Taylor took Randall on a private tour of the place, which seemed positively funereal -- men in dark suits speaking in hushed voices. There was Randall's editor at Houghton Mifflin, two of her lawyers (one being her husband, David Ewing), and two frowning guys, Marshall and Dewey, who were operating in a bodyguard capacity that everyone preferred to define vaguely. (Marshall's signature move was an abrupt glance over the shoulder. Dewey's was a vigilant scowl.) The usually energetic Randall looked worn down. Just after six, the sun began to dip behind the half-constructed skyscraper many blocks behind the house. Early arrivals for the reading were fanning themselves with copies of ''The Wind Done Gone'' and of the Mitchell House's promotional brochures. (''Did you know,'' asked one handout, '''Gone With the Wind' is the world's top-selling book, next to the Bible.'') A tiny group of -- what do you call them? protesters? secessionists? nuts? -- began to assemble outside the wrought-iron gate. First came a guy in a gray coat and cap, decked out to lose the Battle of Gettysburg. He had a sign: ''The Wind Will Always Blow in Atlanta.'' True enough; warm gusts toppled the sign again and again. Two women, Johnny Reb's casually dressed confederates, arrived. One propped the placard up with a purple cooler and held a sign that was lettered, but not punctuated, by hand: ''ALICE WRITE YOUR OWN BOOK.'' The other unfurled the Stars and Bars.

A little after seven, Randall, wired on her ideas and still fired up from her lively buffet dinner with some members of the Mitchell House's board, made her way to the mike to address a crowd of 300 -- mostly women, white and black in roughly equal numbers -- who sat before her in folding chairs on a perfect lawn. Her talk was the same openhearted, participatory show she'd put on at Barnes & Noble in New York -- a kind of Oprah Eggers, but now with a healthy dash of Nina Simone as she excoriated ''GWTW,'' her voluble talk booming from the PA across the neighborhood. Passing drivers rubbernecked. The protesters stood silently. The author opened her question time with an audience sing-along. '''Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' is the best introduction you can have to my book,'' she told them. ''It's all about coded language.''

And just as Alice Randall is unembarrassed to explicate her own symbolism, she is unashamed to use her tongue as a bludgeon. A young black woman who works at the Mitchell House used her turn at the crowd mike to suggest that Margaret Mitchell was not a racist. Randall, having none of it, shrieked back: ''If you don't think that it was racist, it's because you read 'Gone With the Wind,' internalized it, and loved it when you were young! My own mother was damaged by this book and has all kinds of problems with racial identity! You are my example of another generation of black women damaged by 'Gone With the Wind'!'' Some people were applauding; four or five were heading for the door. The woman was still standing and trembling and stammering, so Randall asked her to sit down. ''I'm not going to debate employees of this place.'' That was that. She took some more questions, then signed books for a couple of hours, carefully advising the kids that undedicated volumes have a higher value.

Randall says she's working on a second novel, about a black female professor who gives up the English language for Russian. But also, as her husband said near the end of that night, ''she wants to go back to that mommy/wife/ volunteer life.'' He added, ''We'll see how that goes.''