The 'Wind' Mill

Troy,
It was nice talking with you at the Alice Randall event at the Margaret Mitchell House. I hope you enjoyed it and will have a chance to come to some of our other literary events next time you are in Atlanta. However, most are not that lively! Thanks so much and have a great weekend!
--Ashley

Most ''literary events'' are face-scratching bores, so it was, in fact, a great pleasure. However, what Ashley calls ''lively'' I would refer to as ''grotesquely weird,'' and it's hard to imagine how it might have been otherwise: In the four months since the Mitchell estate first contended that ''The Wind Done Gone'' is ''a blatant and wholesale theft of 'Gone With the Wind,''' Alice Randall has become the most famous first-time novelist in the world. Her status as a First Amendment cause célèbre -- with novelists, scholars, and media corporations supporting her right to parody ''GWTW'' -- has proven instantly convertible to actual celebrity. Before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court's preliminary injunction against its publication, advance copies of ''The Wind Done Gone'' were garnering $400 bids on eBay. Officially released on June 28, it's a best-seller -- No. 11 this week on The New York Times' list.

Now factor in the content of the novel, which reads like a dense and pointed literary analysis spun into a yarn. The book purports to be the recovered diary of Scarlett O'Hara's half-black half sister Cynara -- though in Randall's book Scarlett is called Other. When Randall says, ''My book explodes Ms. Mitchell's book'' -- and she says it often, in a voice that variously drawls down-home and clips aristocratically -- she's talking about using theory as a detonating device to blast ''GWTW'''s ideology. The director Reginald Hudlin, a friend of Randall's since they attended Harvard 20 years ago, sums up her mind-set thus: ''She had written this incredibly complex senior thesis, a sort of feminist, deconstructionist look at Jane Austen. She got a cum laude, but basically only five people in the world could understand it, so she decided she would never do anything that inaccessible again. She thought that she should talk to the masses -- to the people who really need to be spoken to.''

Until ''The Wind Done Gone,'' Randall's main venue had been writing country songs. She fell in love with the genre at Harvard, where she went for an English degree after a liberal-intellectual girlhood in Washington, D.C. ''It was sophomore year, I think,'' she said, three days before her visit to Atlanta. She was sitting in the sick-pastel greenroom of a New York City public radio station and wearing what seems to be her book-tour uniform: simple black top, long black skirt, platform slides, strand of pearls. ''I took a screenwriting class, and I was spending a couple days typing a 110-page script, and I got so bored with whatever pop-rock radio station I was listening to that I decided to turn on the country station. It was a joke, something to distract me. And I was immediately struck that there was this Metaphysical'' -- she is referencing 17th-century poets now -- ''quality to some of the strategy in country lyrics.''

A year and a half after graduating, Randall up and moved to Nashville. On her second night in town, she saw singer-songwriter Steve Earle perform and summoned the temerity to call him. They've been close friends ever since. He says: ''She decided she wasn't gonna quit writing until she got a No. 1 record, and she got one'' -- cowriting Trisha Yearwood's ''Xxx's and Ooo's (An American Girl)'' -- ''and when she did, she quit.'' When she's not writing, she's a ''mommy/wife,'' raising her 13-year-old daughter, Caroline, volunteering at schools, hosting tables at balls, throwing Democratic fund-raisers -- a high-voltage soccer mom at age 42. Novelist Jay McInerney became her friend when he lived in Nashville. ''She knows everybody,'' he says. ''I don't know where she finds the hours for all her enterprises and friendships and good deeds.''

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.''

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