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The Wind Done Gone

Written by Alice Randall

210 pages

Published by Houghton Mifflin

Review by Michelle Trotter Johnson

Receives: 3 Quills

The Copperfield Review The idea behind The Wind Done Gone is to show that the African-American slaves were more than the cardboard cutouts that Margaret Mitchell showed them to be nearly 70 years ago. As Randall's story goes, Gone With the Wind's Prissy has a daughter named Cynara, Cinnamon, or Cindy, depending on where she is and who she's with. Cynara is intelligent, feisty, and she makes her way through the Deep South and Reconstruction Washington on her own terms. Randall was being sued by Margaret Mitchell's estate; as a result of that, or maybe for reasons that have nothing to do with that, she does not use names from Gone With the Wind even though she writes about many of the same characters. Characters with the names of Other, R., and Planter populate her novel.

By focusing on Mitchell's novel, Randall missed a fine opportunity to do something rare--write about African-American slaves and their later generations as if they were unique, intelligent, sensitive individuals. There are too few novels that do so--Beloved by Toni Morrison and Roots by Alex Haley are two books that come to mind. Instead of creating her own story, Randall rewrote or continued Mitchell's in a way to suit her, and she wasn't shy about using Mitchell's story to spice up her own. What if Cynara was not Prissy's daughter? Would her story be as interesting? Cynara is a strong character, but the way the novel makes constant references to her famous relatives, it is impossible to think of her separately from them, which ultimately weakens her story.

I appreciate what Randall was trying to do--show where Mitchell's novel was extremely lacking in its portrayal of the slave characters. But Randall would have done better to show strong slave and newly freed characters in a unique story, a story that came from her heart, not Mitchell's.

This novel does make you think about Gone With the Wind and its portrayal of slave characters as one-dimensional people with little intelligence or depth. If that was Randall's only intention, then she succeeded.

Michelle Trotter Johnson is an educator from Taos, New Mexico, with degrees in English and History. She is currently working on her first historical novel.