The 'Wind' Mill

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.''