by Leonora Seinfeld

     In the sixth grade I began my love affair with Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Closing my eyes, I envisioned the white-washed walls of the great plantation house, the creaseless dresses of the southern belle, the languid gestures of the infamous blockade-runner as he coaxes our heroine out of her mourning attire and out onto the dance floor in a spirited, subversive waltz.

     It was only when I got older that I began to wonder about the Others; who was this Mammy showing such undying loyalty to her mistress and master? What did she do when she was not lacing up Scarlett's stays or cajoling her into eating a full meal? Who was the woman underneath the caricature of excessive, sexless poundage and apron strings?

     Alice Randall answers that question, and more. In what has been called the unauthorized parody of Gone With the Wind, Randall gives name, presence and breathtaking prose to Scarlett's mulatto half-sister, Cynara. Unknown to us in Mitchell's work, Cynara emerges from the pages of The Wind Done Gone as the full-grown daughter of Mammy and Scarlett's father, who is now renamed Planter. In fact, the reader finds that once familiar characters are given new names according to the perspective of our new protagonist: Scarlett becomes Other, Rhett is simply R., and Other's mother is Lady. And with the new names come equally jarring revelations; we are told a darker story of the machinations behind the great plantation house, the story of the behind the scene players who truly control it. Like Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Joan Aiken's Jane Fairfax: Jane Austen's Emma, Through Another's Eyes, the underdogs are fleshed out from silhouette-like existences and into proactive, multi-faceted agents. From there they toy with the perpetrated myths that we have taken for granted, and finally, they usurp the former storytelling.

     I, the reader, find myself with Cynara at her mother's funeral. I am looking out onto the family burial ground while listening to the Planter's valet, Garlic, speak about how he won his master from a former one. Although the two white men believed that they were playing a card game with a slave as the prize, Garlic mixed the drinks unevenly so that Planter would win. He chose his master, just in the way that he chose his master's bride and built and ruled the master's house with his own hands and vision: "We, Mammy and me, kept this place together because it was ours. Here I raised my family. Right this morning we're burying the real mistress of the house."

     The Wind Done Gone is a revisionist history of the south, a political and social commentary. But more significantly, it is the personal story of Cynara. When I meet her, I initially think of Nella Larsen's portrayal of the tragic mulatto figure in her novel Quicksand. Like Larsen's Helga Crane, Cynara constantly deals with the psychic dualism of her biracial heritage. As R.'s mistress, she is desired for her exotic Otherness, yet is expected to keep a house and social demeanor akin to that of a white southern woman. Yet unlike Helga, Cynara constructs choices for herself whereas Helga felt that there were none, even in the burgeoning era of 1920s Harlem. In a world were the twilight of Reconstruction is waning, Cynara manages yet to create her own Renaissance.

     The Wind Done Gone transcends the genre of literary parody into something much more substantial, becoming a work independent of its love-hate muse. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's statements on the art of literary criticism, where he makes the bold claim that the critic can transcend the subject of critique, using it merely as a springboard for his own artistic virtuosity. Alice Randall, finding herself at first within the constraints of Mitchell's narrative as a satirist, ends up creating a character who bends and morphs the walls of Tara until we can only recognize them as something entirely her own.