The Wind Done Gone...

I enjoyed reading Gone with the Wind. Though I love the movie, I never read the novel until after I moved to Atlanta. "Tara" is fictionally located only fifteen miles away from Atlanta, and much of the novel is based on how Atlanta went from a tiny little train depot town to the booming industrial center of the south; so beyond the mere entertainment factor (and it was just entertainment, no real insight into humanity here) it was quite informational as well.

However, as anyone who has read the novel can attest, the novel is very racially skewed, caricaturing all African Americans into neat little boxes. It troubled me when I read the novel because I felt like, um, should I like this? It's quite racist. When I heard about The Wind Done Gone, which has this big sticket on it saying Unauthorized Parody on it, I though oh, this person is trying to capitalize on Gone with the Wind and make even MORE fun of the characterizations of African Americans in the slave and Reconstruction Era. I found quite the opposite as I read it this week.

It's a very insightful little novel (only a hundred or so pages compared to 400+ of the original), and rather than being a "parody," I thought it more to be a voice for many children of the time who had inherited a very confusing heritage (mother a slave/father a plantation owner). Though the author uses clever little nicknames (Other for Scarlett, R. for Rhett, Beauty for Belle Watling the prostitute), the texture of the story interweaves and builds upon themes that were present but never addressed in GWTW. Anyway I enjoyed it and anyone who's a fan of feminist/African American lit will definitely find it worth reading.

Whenever I think of Gone With the Wind I think of Stephanie, the crazy red haired woman who was a supervisor at the library when I worked there my freshman summer. She was literally obsessed with the novel having read it, she claimed, hundreds of times and also collected miniature porcelain dolls of Scarlett in different dresses (yes, like the ones you see featured in Parade Magazine).