work, invoking and signifying on Margaret Mitch-
ell’s Gone with the Wind, set off a firestorm of
controversy. The Margaret Mitchell Trust sued to
block publication of The Wind Done Gone, claim-
ing it was plagiarism. The judge initially agreed
with the Mitchell Trust and issued an injunction
against publication but ultimately decided that
Randall’s novel was protected as a literary parody
under “fair use” laws.
The work follows the conventions of neo–slave
narratives. As the story of a black woman’s emer-
gence from patriarchal domination, it is situated
at the intersection of race and gender ideologies.
Its gender motifs give the text a privileged place
in 20th-century black feminist fiction. Randall
threads these discourses together into a master-
work of metafiction. Randall’s self-conscious
narrator, Cynara, a biracial plantation child, and
Pallas, her slave mother, embody and undermine
every plantation stereotype the myths of the Old
South invented for them.
Cynara crosses the boundaries between races,
appropriates the masters’ discourse, and writes
herself into Scarlett O’Hara’s story. Through Cy-
nara, Randall reimagines the antebellum planta-
tion, rewrites the slaves’ motives and desires, and
recalibrates the scales of history, giving the house
slaves the chance to tell their side of the planta-
tion’s story. Like historical slave narrators, Cynara
makes her journey to literacy at great cost, and the
knowledge literacy provides is cruel. With literacy,
however, comes Cynara’s voice. At unexpected mo-
ments in her narration, Cynara’s slave vernacular
displaces her literate voice, exposing a sensibility
formed in the sorrows of slavery.
Much of Cynara’s pain derives from her con-
nection to her slave mother, Pallas. Cynara must
revisit her past and discover the reasons her
mother rejected her. In Cynara’s memories, the
reader confronts a dynamic usually absent from
contemporary African-American women’s fic-
tion: a slave mother who has rejected her own
daughter. Randall also uses Pallas to critique the
stereotype of the “MAMMY” figure in traditional
plantation fiction, who is typically represented as
a loyal, self-repressing, asexual servant who dotes
excessively on white children to the exclusion of
her own. Pallas emerges as a far more complex
and human mother.
In the spirit of Reconstruction and in the dis-
covery of racial pride, Cynara is reconciled to her
mother, her identity, and her past. Cynara no lon-
ger desires to erase her racial memory. Her earlier
attempts at erasure through denial, isolation, and
self-immolation did not enable her liberation.
Until Cynara knew her past and embraced all that
it bequeathed to her, she was not free to pursue
her own vision for her future. Cynara’s difficulties
with her past reflect America’s difficulties with its
antebellum history and possibly suggest a pathway
to America’s liberation from that past, which, if the
actions of the Margaret Mitchell Trust are any indi-
cation, still captivates public memory. Troubled by
America’s fascination with a mythic past inscribed
in the novel Gone with the Wind, Randall revisited
the myth and created another version—one that
augments the deficient myth and embraces all of
who we are: masters and slaves, saints and sinners,
the loved and the rejected.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gillespie, Nick. “Tomorrow Is Another Day in Court.”
Reason 33, no. 3 (July 2001): 61–63.
Grossett, Jeffrey. “The Wind Done Gone: Transform-
ing Tara into a Plantation Parody.” Case Western
Reserve Law Review 52, no. 4 (Summer 2002):
1–16.
Tucker, Veta S. “Scarlett Dethroned, or Hell Hath
No Fury like The Wind Done Gone: Malicious
Mammy and her Plucky Daughter.” Warpland:
A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas 7, no. 1
(2001): 178–193.
Veta S. TuckerWolfe, George (1954– )
Born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1954, George
Wolfe became active in local theater at an early age
and considered himself “obsessed” with theater by
age six. He majored in acting and theater design
at Pomona College and wrote plays, winning the558 Wolfe, George