Enslaved Voices

Randall, Alice. The Wind Done Gone.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

               

                According to words provided on the publication page, “This novel is the author’s critique of and reaction to the world described in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.”  Those words and the dates January 1, 1940 (movie premiere of GWTW) and July 1936 (publication of GWTW) satisfy the minimum requirements for cultural literacy in America.  Well, perhaps you want to know the phrase “gone with the wind” is from Ernest Dowson’s poem ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub rego Cynarae “ [I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cyrana].  That information puts you one up on people who only know the wind done gone.  And Mr. Dowson got the title for his poem from the Roman poet Horace.  Enough said.

                Ms. Randall makes an effort to insert her first novel into the American novel (romance novel) tradition by imitating Hawthorne’s Custom House preface for The Scarlet Letter.  In “Notes on the Text,” Randall pretends to have discovered the document (a leather-bound diary) by Prissy Cynara Brown  in the 1990s among “the effects of an elderly colored lady who had been in an assisted-living center just outside Atlanta”(v).  Inside the document was “a fragment of green silk.”  Inside his document, Hawthorne discovered  a bit of cloth, a scarlet letter.   Let us recall that neither Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne nor Mitchell’s heroine Scarlett O’Hara was a lady; they were useful tools in the making of whiteness. Unlike the superior oral narration of the enslaved heroine in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose which tells us so much about the world described in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, the febrile writerly voice of Prissy Cynara Brown tells us more about the pathology of the segregated South that incarcerated Margaret Mitchell than it does about the slave community.  In that sense it justifies Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s  claim that The Wind Done Gone is “a moving act of political commentary.” The novel, however, deconstructs the parodic puffery of his saying that in Randall’s novel “at last the slaves at Tara have found their voice.”  The enslaved at Tara will never have a voice to which one feels compelled to listen.  We are too much reminded that the unwritten parody of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust is entitled Stranger in the Mud.

                Alas, in the United States, literature continues to be equipment for assisted-living.

Jeremiah Ramcat

August 14, 2012