Literary Commerce
According to words provided on the publication page, The Wind Done Gone “is the author’s
critique of and reaction to the world described in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.” We may suppose this statement and the dates
January 1, 1940 (movie premiere of GWTW)
and July 1936 (publication of GWTW)
satisfy minimum requirements for cultural literacy in America. Students in AP English courses are encouraged
to know the phrase “gone with the wind”
is from Ernest Dowson’s poem “Non sum quails eram bonae sub rego
Cynarae” (I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cyrana). That information puts AP students a step
ahead. Those who get superior AP
education will also know Dowson got the title for his poem from the Roman poet
Horace. In the antiquity of the early 20th
century, some black students took pride in retaining such information.
Now, it suffices for any American student to remix Alice
Randall’s title The Wind Done Gone as
Did the Wind Gone? So much is missed.
Randall inserts her first novel into the American romance
tradition by imitating Hawthorne’s Custom House preface for The Scarlet Letter. In “Notes on the
Text,” she 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, an overtly historical textile.
Recall that neither Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne nor Mitchell’s
Scarlett O’Hara was a lady. They were
useful tools in the making of whiteness.
Unlike the rich oral narration of the enslaved heroine in Sherley Anne
Williams’s Dessa Rose (which tells us
so much about the world described in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee), the febrile writerly narration of Prissy Cynara Brown
tells us more about the pathology of Margaret Mitchell’s “New South” than it
does about the slave community. In that
sense, it justifies Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s remark that The Wind Done Gone is “a moving act of political commentary.” Randall’s novel deconstructs, however, the
puffery of Gates’s saying that in The
Wind Done Gone “at last the
slaves at Tara have found their voice.”
Caveat Emptor. When the wind
leaves, the voice can’t be found.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
October 17, 2013
