Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (65 page)

The federal government, with the support of Walt Disney Company and other media interests, defended the copyright extension on the grounds that liberal copyright laws encourage progress in the arts by ensuring that artists, and later their heirs, receive the income derived from the artists' labors. Advocates of copyright extension equated artistic rights to traditional property rights. If someone builds an apartment building and leaves it to their grandchildren, those heirs are entitled to collect rents in perpetuity. Why should creative works be held to a different standard? Both sides dug in their heels, and the case would spend years moving through the federal court system.

Mitchell trustees Clarke and Anderson—Herbert R. Elsas had died in 1995—chose not to join the battle. “What happens, happens,” Anderson said of the estate's stance.
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So, as the century came to an end, the future of
Gone With the Wind
was up in the air. Would the estate have only another decade to profit from the copyright?

While the litigation dragged on, the search continued for a new sequel writer. In early 2001, the estate and St. Martin's chose Virginia's Donald McCaig, author of the critically acclaimed Civil War novel
Jacob's Ladder
. McCaig was no
Gone With the Wind
enthusiast—he had never read the novel before being approached about the sequel. After studying Mitchell's work, though, he came to view it as “astonishing” and deemed Scarlett O'Hara the “finest woman character in American literature.”
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As had been Conroy's proposed approach, McCaig would focus on the enigmatic Rhett Butler. Thinking a conventional sequel or prequel would pale by comparison to the original, he agreed to write what perhaps can best be termed a “requel”—a retelling of the story before and during the events in Mitchell's book, combined with his version of what happened afterward.

As St. Martin's prepared to announce McCaig's selection, publisher Houghton Mifflin Company issued advance reading copies of a novel titled
The Wind Done Gone
, which it characterized as a “rejoinder” to
Gone With
the Wind
. Written by African American songwriter Alice Randall of Nashville, Tennessee,
The Wind Done Gone
presented the fictional diary of a former slave named Cynara, a mulatto, green-eyed daughter of a plantation owner called Planter and a slave woman named Mammy. The story retells
Gone With the Wind
from Cynara's perspective, and includes Cynara's halfsister, Other, and her longtime lover, R.; Beauty, the owner of an Atlanta brothel; Mealy Mouth and her husband, Dreamy Gentleman; and plantations called Tata and Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees. Randall said that she had enjoyed reading
Gone With the Wind
as a girl but had come to object to the book on the grounds that it turned slavery into a form of entertainment. She wrote her rejoinder to address the damage she felt Mitchell's work had caused blacks, pointing specifically to the stereotypes of the overweight Mammy and scatterbrained Prissy. Randall noted difficulties she faced traveling overseas where, for many people,
Gone With the Wind
is the sole reference point for what African Americans are like.
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On March 16, 2001, the Mitchell estate moved to halt publication of
The Wind Done Gone
, calling it a “blatant and wholesale theft” of Mitchell's “characters, settings, plot lines and other copyrighted elements.” The suit also claimed that allowing Randall to use the thinly disguised characters in
Gone With the Wind
would diminish or preclude the estate's ability to control future derivative works. The complaint sought ten million dollars in damages and asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent Randall's book from being sold while the lawsuit made its way through the legal system.

Randall expressed shock at the estate's reaction, saying she had “sought to dismantle
Gone With the Wind
, not freeload off it.”
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Houghton Mifflin maintained
The Wind Done Gone
was a classic parody of Mitchell's work and thus fell within the fair use exception to the estate's copyright. According to the publisher, Mitchell's book had become such a seminal source of information about American plantation life that the public interest necessitated another perspective being brought forth.
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Houghton Mifflin lined up a team of influential authors, editors, and scholars to support its position. Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning author Toni Morrison submitted a declaration to the court praising Randall's efforts to offer a more accurate version of slave life and referring to her prose as “evocative, wry, plangent.”
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Pat Conroy joined the fray by e-mail from the deck of a ship en route from Egypt to Turkey. He commended Randall for her clever play on
Gone With
the Wind
and declared her “uncommonly talented.” He excoriated Anderson and Clarke for their tenaciousness in protecting
Gone With the Wind
, referring to them as “rapacious” and lacking any sense of humor. Conroy also played the race card, expressing indignation that the estate was trying to prevent an African American woman from publishing her first novel.
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At a hearing that April before a U.S. District Court in Atlanta, the estate took issue with the accusations of Mitchell and her book being racist. It introduced into evidence Conroy's 1998 letter about Mitchell's fine characterization of African American characters. Moreover, it argued, through outside counsel hired to handle the litigation, race was not germane to the case: “It's not about whether Margaret Mitchell wrote a racist book that may or may not need correcting, and it's not that Ms. Randall cannot write a book, fiction or non-fiction, that expresses the view that slavery was horrible.” The salient issue, the estate argued, was a legal one: had Randall gone too far in using Mitchell's copyrighted work in making her point?
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The court declared
The Wind Done Gone
“unabated piracy” of Mitchell's novel and ordered Houghton Mifflin to stop “further production, display, distribution, advertising, sale, or offer for sale” of the book pending disposition of the case. The opinion stated that Randall's use of Mitchell's copyrighted material went “well beyond” what was necessary to critique
Gone With the Wind
, thus removing Randall's book “from the safe harbor of parody.”
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Houghton Mifflin immediately appealed, and on May 25, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction, ruling that the publisher was entitled to a hearing on the merits of the case before the book could be barred from distribution. The Mitchell estate sought a rehearing before the full appeals court, but it would take months to obtain a ruling on that request.

Meanwhile, the legal battle had garnered extensive press coverage, which Houghton Mifflin put to good use. Within days of the appellate court's decision, the publisher had
The Wind Done Gone
in the nation's bookstores, with a dust jacket declaring it “The Unauthorized Parody” of
Gone With the Wind
. Randall became an overnight sensation by giving impassioned press interviews declaring the appeals court decision a victory for free speech. Booksellers treated
The Wind Done Gone
as an imminent blockbuster. They placed large orders, displayed it prominently, and offered promotional discounts—perks generally reserved for books with glowing reviews or a proven sales record.
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In the short run, the bets paid off as the book quickly landed on bestseller lists.

But the fascination did not last long. Critical reviews of Randall's work were mixed. While
Booklist
called it “brilliant” and
Publishers Weekly
credited Randall with “sharp” insights,
The Wind Done Gone
left many critics unsatisfied. In the
New York Times
, Megan Harlan said the lawsuit over the book was more interesting than the book itself.
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Lisa Schwarzbaum of
Entertainment Weekly
called
The Wind Done Gone
“a shack” compared to the “impregnable fortress” of
Gone With the Wind
.
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Other critics questioned Randall's motives, suggesting that she had written the book as a publicity stunt rather than as a thoughtful political commentary. A nationally syndicated editorial cartoon depicted Randall in front of her computer working on her “next book”—“The Mockingbird Done Died.”
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Randall's celebrity appeal suffered further when she made an impolitic appearance that summer at the Margaret Mitchell House, an Atlanta museum located in the Crescent Avenue apartment building where Mitchell wrote most of
Gone With the Wind
. During a question-and-answer period, a young African American woman on the staff of the facility expressed her view that Margaret Mitchell was not a racist. According to press reports, Randall shrieked at the woman, claiming that the staffer had been duped into admiring
Gone With the Wind
. When the young woman tried to apologize for causing offense, Randall asked her to sit down, announcing that she was not going to debate an employee of the Mitchell House. In an effort to smooth over the awkward moment, the facility's director, Mary Rose Taylor, began to speak about “dignity” and “building bridges.” As she did, another African American woman approached the microphone to ask a question. Randall interrupted Taylor, reports said, and declared indignantly, “Here we are, silencing another black woman!”
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Troy Patterson, a critic for
Entertainment Weekly
, was in the audience that day and summed it up as “grotesquely weird.”
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Angela Webster of the
Times-Herald
in Newnan, Georgia, wrote an editorial piece, equating Randall's outburst to “an especially petulant child embarrassing his mother” in a grocery store. “You just want to crawl under a rock and pretend you haven't seen what you've just seen,” she wrote, struggling to “convey the awfulness of watching a grown woman lose it so publicly.” Webster wrote a parody of her own titled “The Mind Done Gone,” with Randall's and Taylor's parts played by characters named Bitter and Nervous.
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By the time the Eleventh Circuit denied the estate's request for a rehearing that October,
The Wind Done Gone
had fallen off the
New York
Times
bestseller list. Anderson and Clarke decided that a costly legal battle fighting Randall's book was not worth the effort. Over the next several months, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement under which the estate agreed to drop the suit in exchange for Houghton Mifflin making a donation to Atlanta's Morehouse College, a historically black school where Margaret Mitchell anonymously provided financial aid to black medical students in the 1940s. Neither side publicly disclosed the amount of the donation.
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Houghton Mifflin continued to distribute Randall's book under the parody label.

The media treated the Mitchell trustees as if they had admitted defeat and widely criticized them for having picked on Randall. The copyright extension litigation remained pending, and
The Wind Done Gone
case was cited as a textbook example of a greedy literary estate seeking to block the creative process of a living artist. The backlash of being perceived as overly hawkish did not bother Clarke, then eighty-six, or Anderson, eighty-two, who felt they had nothing for which to apologize. When asked about their image as bad guys, Clarke assured a reporter that he and Anderson did not have horns.
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They owed a fiduciary duty to the Mitchell estate and, equally important, had made a promise to Stephens Mitchell that they would look after his sister's literary rights. While it might seem overzealous to go after well-intentioned or minor infringements, Anderson pointed out that they do not have the luxury of sitting back and letting people chip away at
Gone
With the Wind
a little bit here, a little bit there. At some point, they'd be left with nothing. That said, if he had it to do over again, Anderson later admitted he would not necessarily bother going after Randall. “If we had done absolutely nothing, that book would have faded into the shadows pretty quickly,” he stated.
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In an interview almost a decade after her book's release, Randall took issue with any suggestion that her book benefited from the publicity surrounding the litigation. While the hype undoubtedly sold books, she suggested the media circus did more harm than good. Many reviewers rushed through
The Wind Done Gone
in an effort to meet publication deadlines, she said, and failed to give it the attention it required. “It was meant to be a difficult book. It's a coded parody grounded in other texts. Many of the critics didn't take the time to read it for what it was.” As a result, she said, they missed the point, and her book was dismissed too quickly by a broad segment of readers.
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But Randall appeared to hold no grudges against the Mitchell estate. “In all honesty, if I had to guess, I think the lawyers actually believed I was trying to steal fans of
Gone With the Wind
for my own financial gain. I suspect it never occurred to them that there are people who actually hate
Gone With the Wind
and what it stands for.” The author saw her conflict with the estate as a clash of purposes. “Their focus was on the business of the literary rights. Mine was on the art, heart, and reality of life in the South. They tried to take me to the other side of the street, and that just isn't where my work goes.” She maintained that her aim in writing the book was to provoke discussion, a goal she unquestionably achieved. Long past the controversy, Randall said her book “is still doing good work.”
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In the decade since its publication,
The Wind Done Gone
has sold approximately two hundred thousand copies in the United States.
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