Read an Excerpt

THE WIND DONE GONE is billed as an "unauthorized parody" on its
cover. If you haven't been following entertainment news for the
last few months, then you may have missed that this book is an
unauthorized parody of the American classic GONE WITH THE WIND,
Margaret Mitchell's paean to the before and after world of the
Civil War through the eyes of the feisty daughter of a plantation
owner, whose beloved home Tara falls prey to Sherman's March and is
rebuilt by said daughter in the later years of her life. Mitchell's
book is about a family, a literary epic about a woman and her
family and the meaning of loyalty. Randall's book is a slap in the
face of GONE WITH THE WIND, a strange perversion of what I could
only call fiction that she considered too white. The point of this
book is to give the black characters in the Mitchell book names and
faces and souls. If only Randall had just written a book about
these men and women, I would have enjoyed it a great deal
more.

Parodies are usually funny, rather hell-bent in their twisting of
the original material. THE WIND DONE GONE reads like a novel of the
Civil War told by Edwidge Danticat, serious, well-meaning, even a
little dry. It seems like perfectly reasonable fiction to me ---
but "parody" it is not. If only I had not been aware of its
supposing to be a parody, I would have found it a perfectly good
story. Instead, I spent the time translating "Other" to mean
Scarlett and "R" to mean Rhett Butler. Our protagonist Cynara, who
tells the story in her own voice, is having an affair with "R" and
has nothing but bad feelings for the "other" people of Tara. She
and Mammy and Garlic and the other folks who run Tara are all
finely drawn characters but why couldn't they just exist on their
own? Randall's act of defiance against this stalwart of white
American culture seems to be badly skewed --- she doesn't do
justice to her characters by setting them in a place that has
already been explored famously.

Randall is also a songwriter for Nashville artists and perhaps it
is in the jaunty ability of country songs to be both ironic and
stupid at the same time that she found her original intent for this
so-called "parody." I would have written something original and
simply added my distinctive voice to the black pantheon if I were
her. But I'm not, and so all I can say is that this is a good book
that deserves to stand on its own and not as the ill-tempered
illegitimate successor to one of America's best-known novels.