The Wind Done Gone

[Cazzle]

I’ve been reading about this book since April. I dismissed it as an April Fool’s Joke when I read in the newspaper on April 1 that someone was trying to publish a book called The Wind Done Gone, but have since found it was true. Reading interviews and reviews on various sites, I have wondered if the author is motivated by pride in her race, or profit.
(From here and here)

"It (Gone With The Wind) was written in the early part of the century, but many of the ideas that it puts forth influence us to this day… Gone With the Wind suggests that blacks are inherently intellectually inferior and different. In my book, The Wind Done Gone, Cynerae’s very words argue that blacks can be brilliant and insightful, and intellectually competent. I think all too unfortunately, the myth of black intellectual inferiority haunts us to this day - Alice Randall.

Well, that’s a noble and worthwhile goal - to show the world that black people are intelligent and equal to white people in every way. I support this 100%, and think it’s only a shame that in 2001 we still need to get this across to some people. But then I read:

*"In Randall’s version of the events at Tara – Tata in her book – slaves hold the power. Garlic (Pork), Mammy, and Miss Priss (Prissy) control the household. "

“Randall renders the white characters ineffectual. Dreamy Gentleman (Ashley) is gay, and Miss Priss maintains a certain hold over him because she knows his secret. Mealy Mouth (Melanie) is a skinny, shriveled-up little thing incapable of doing anything of any consequence (except give birth). Lady (Ellen), the tower of strength, piety, and rectitude in Gone with the Wind, is reduced by the knowledge that she, and therefore Scarlett and her sisters, have been tainted by Negro blood. Even R. (Rhett), the dashing blockade-runner, is old, wrinkly, and unappealing.”*

Ok. So, to show that black people are equal to white people in every way, and to destroy the effect of the racist portrayal of black people in Gone With The Wind, Alice Randall has protrayed white people as “ineffectual”, gay, incompetent, old. Isn’t racism the whole problem with the first book? Isn’t portraying the white characters as imbeciles, just because they are white, racist? I also think it’s a shame that she couldn’t find a way of demeaning Ashley without falling back on that old stand-by - homosexuality. Ah, yes. Back in the old South, white men were either molesting their slave women, or each other.

Worst of all, with all the talent, energy and pride in the black community, this woman has come forth claiming she’s fighting back for her people by taking someone else’s ideas, story, characters and fame, and re-writing them from her own agenda. Do two wrongs make a right? Gone With The Wind was written in the style of it’s day - that is, with a supreme confidence in the superiority of white people over black. To attempt to rebutt this by making the slaves superior to the white people, is Alice Randall commiting the same crime as Margaret Mitchell?

Is there anyone on this board who has actually read this book? Is it a fair parody of the original, empowering African-Americans… or is it a cheap rip-off of the first book trying to justify it’s existance by claiming to be a statement against racism? I’m very eager to hear some feedback about The Wind Done Gone. I would love to read it, but first I want to know more about it, and to clear up the confusion I feel after reading the articles quoted here.

[kniz]

When the blacks in Africa were fighting to free themselves from colonialism they had a rally word that meant freedom. When asked what freedom meant most would reply something like the following: that it meant they would sit in a big chair and have white men fanning them. IMHO the problem was that they really didn’t understand that freedom was a lot better than what they imagined. In the same vein, any book that is titled The Wind Done Gone seems to have missed the point from the git-go.

Not exactly on the subject but this may be of interest: http://pages.prodigy.net/krtq73aa/value.htm