Alice Randall

The Wind Done Gone (Houghton Mifflin Trade, $22, 224 pp.)

Gone With the Wind has long been considered a classic. Author Margaret Mitchell’s language has become a part of the Southern novelist’s vernacular since the work’s debut 65 years ago. Yet, while Mitchell may have perfected the dialect, the storyline is a myth of Southern gentility, focusing on the lives of only half of the narrative’s participants. It is a division of black and white—one that portrays a white world of complexity and intelligence and a black world of one-dimensional, cartoonish characters.

In her now-famous debut novel The Wind Done Gone, Nashville songwriter Alice Randall parodies Mitchell’s work, centering the story on an intelligent black woman and exploring the lives of characters considered minor in the earlier novel. Controversy came before Randall’s book ever made it to press; the Mitchell Estate set out to halt publication, claiming The Wind Done Gone was too closely linked to, and taking much from, Mitchell’s original story. Randall defended her work by the nature of the book itself, a parody, and under this premise a judge allowed its publication. The novel has garnered a lot of attention as a result of the lawsuit, more than it has as a literary work. So, what of its value beyond the hype?

Just as the judge looked to the book’s concept for his decision, it is on this same basis that The Wind Done Gone should be evaluated. Parody has long served the literary world as a source of intelligent humor, usually reflecting the current, collective mind-set. It has also been an important tradition of the African American community. Randall’s interpretation of parody seems to hover between the traditional concept and a parallel approach to the Mitchell work.

Written as a diary, The Wind Done Gone follows the life of Cynara, daughter of plantation slave Mammy and Irish landowner Planter. Through thoughtful journal entries, the young woman searches for answers to questions of her own upbringing while struggling to find a place in a world that is not yet ready for a strong, independent black woman. The first entry provides vital connections in her family tree, one composed of the plantations’ owners, dwellers, and slaves. Among the relations is her half-sister and doppelganger, Other. Clearly Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara character, Other is portrayed as a well-intended, not-so-bright, fragile Southern belle. She is the link to an all-white world that is merely peripheral in Randall’s novel. Randall transforms Mitchell’s Scarlett into Cynara as well, affixing many of the same moral dilemmas and values of the earlier character to her protagonist. Deconstructing the myths depicted in Gone With the Wind, Randall provides a history that is certainly more accurate. Neither timid nor apologetic, The Wind Done Gone sets the record straight by debunking the notions of pure bloodlines and perfect parentage that were frequently perpetuated in Old South mythology.

Interestingly, an ongoing theme of nursing or suckling mixes nourishment with sexuality, adding to the many dark little secrets that abound in Randall’s book. At one point, she writes, “The Rosebud mouth attached to the black woman lifting the child to her pleasures, as the child, awake, untouched by stays and hoops, stands on tippy-toe to get her fill of pleasure, all raven-haired and unashamed of hunger. Him laughed. For his first-born daughter the pangs of hunger were as delightful as a mosquito bite: something to scratch in the next moment, the promise of pleasure to come.”

As a reassessment of the Civil War-era South, the novel rattles the world Mitchell created. But what of its integrity as a work of literature? Though on occasion the dialogue gets a bit predictable, particularly in the earlier entries, the book’s greatest strengths lie in the depth and complexity of its characters. Especially interesting are the parallels between the narrator and Sally Hemings. For example, both Hemings and the fictional character have politicians for lovers; because of this, each had opportunities that exceeded those allowed in their own times for black women.

But even more intriguing is the twist of portraying both Cynara and Other as Scarlett. This complicated weaving of one of Mitchell’s characters into two different women allows Randall to exemplify all of Scarlett’s strengths in Cynara and her weaknesses in the white character, Other—thus explaining Randall’s inventive name for this secondary character.

Randall’s songwriting background is evident in the book’s distinct lyrical quality, with the repetition of key phrases being reminiscent of many classic country songs. Consider the following lines: “Was it always there for me to suck in on the tip of your pap and I didn’t taste it, in your eye when you watched Other? In your eye when you watched Planter? The trick you played on him. And what about the trick you played on me? That I was the one flavor and she was—other—and better than me? Other and better than my mother?”

The Wind Done Gone further evidences the diversity of a growing list of Middle Tennessee-based authors. Consider among names like Tony Earley, William Gay, Jay McInerney, A. Manette Ansay, Ann Patchett, and Madison Smartt Bell that of Alice Randall. Her unapologetic words remind us of the delicacies and dynamics of human relationships—and that familial ties do not always assume a bloodline.

—Angela Messina

Waxing Moon

Graduate programs in creative writing attract thousands and thousands of students, almost all of them destined to literary mediocrity at best. But such students, doomed as they may be to the obscurity of coffeehouse poetry readings and lost first-novel contests, are the cash cows of college English departments—keeping the tuition influx steady and the tenured writers-in-residence compensated well enough to survive while doing their own writing. What the writers-in-residence actually do for their students in return is not always quite as clear. Beyond the hope of learning to make a well-turned sentence or iambic line, most graduate students of creative writing desperately want to be published, to make some money at writing, and their creative-writing teachers can’t always do much to help them there.

Which makes the publication of Moon Women (Delacorte Press, $23.95, 352 pp.) by first-time novelist Pamela Duncan something of a novelty. Duncan wrote the first draft of the book while she was author Lee Smith’s student at North Carolina State University, and it was Smith’s own agent who sold Moon Women, as well as a novel still in progress, to Delacorte Press.

Smith’s influence is all over this book, in more ways than one. The story takes place in or near Black Mountain, N.C., the haunt of much of Smith’s fiction; and the most compelling characters, like Smith’s, are blue-collar mountain women struggling to come to terms with their own unspoken desires as they collide with the rock-clad boundaries of female life in this narrow world. But the similarities may well be more the result of serendipity, of overlapping experience, than of simple slavish imitation of a mentor: For all the flaws in this book, Duncan does seem to be writing about what she knows. And after the stumbling first third of the book, she’s steadied enough as a writer to make the world she knows compelling and the people she knows the kind of people you have no choice but to become involved with.

It’s the people who bring this book to life: old Marvelle Moon, 81, whose grip on reality slips disastrously every now and then, but who provides the stability and resilience so lacking in the younger women in her family; menopausal Ruth Ann, newly divorced and laid off from the mill she’s worked at since high school; never-been-kissed Cassandra, an overweight and lonely day-care worker; and 19-year-old Ashley, Ruth Ann’s daughter who comes home from rehab pregnant. The slow disintegration of Marvelle’s mind serves as the catalyst for the reconnection of three generations (four, if you count the unborn baby, which we know is a daughter) of misunderstood and misunderstanding Moon women. The subtle intertwining of their stories will make this the perfect book-club book because of the way it mimics so much of female life, Southern or not, backwoods or not.

It takes some persistence to get through that first shaky third of the book, however. One thing graduate programs of creative writing don’t seem to be teaching their students is that Southern literature has had its fill of biscuits and ham and sliced tomatoes. Sure, the groaning sideboard is standard fare in every Southern grandmother’s house, but it has become a literary stereotype. Likewise mountain speech patterns. One trick Smith herself has mastered is the subtle use of colloquialisms—adding a “honey” and the occasional “ain’t” to remind us that we’re in the hills of western North Carolina, but refusing to knock us upside the haid with them half-rotted two-by-fours a-layin’ long-side the big barn of Dolly Parton idiom. It takes Duncan half the book to lay off the two-by-fours in narration, and she never does limit them in dialogue.

Still, there are signs here that Pamela Duncan is a writer to watch. For one thing, she’s already got the nerve to use an omniscient point of view, something few contemporary writers attempt anymore. Duncan manages to speak just as compellingly from within the men in the story—A.J., the repentant philanderer trying awkwardly to woo Ruth Ann back; Keith, the teenage father-to-be struggling to make a family of an unplanned pregnancy despite having had no family of his own to learn from; even Dwight, Ruth Ann’s taciturn brother who doesn’t make a serious appearance until the novel’s final pages—as from within the women who give this book its title. When a writer can get this close to the hearts of this many well-drawn characters, and can build a story for them to inhabit that makes you want to stay up late reading, it’s possible to forgive her for a few too many references to mashed taters and gravy. It may even justify the existence of university creative-writing programs.

Pamela Duncan will read from and sign Moon Women 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23, at David-Kidd Booksellers, 4007 Hillsboro Rd.

—Margaret Renkl