Manic Monday: Wind

The Manic Monday word this week is WIND. I considered going musical with Earth Wind and Fire. Some of my best slow-dance memories are a direct result of EWF magic. I also enjoy all renditions of 'The Wind Beneath My Wings'. I thought about going oceanic to discuss wind-blown sailboats. However, at the end of the day, most of you come to the Electronic Village Manic Monday meme in search of a unique aspect of African American history.

I'll try not to disappoint.

Did you know that the top movie quote of all time comes from the movie, Gone With The Wind? Many of you are saying the quote before you read this sentence --> "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

But, how many of you know that a parody of Gone With The Wind was written a few years ago called, The Wind Done Gone? The book was written by Alice Randall. Randall was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard in 1981. She was awarded the Free Spirit Award in 2001 and the Literature Award of Excellence by the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002, and she was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 2002. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Alice Randall catapulted into the spotlight for her parody of "Gone With The Wind," a project she contemplated after learning that Malcolm X once said the movie ruined a whole summer of his.

"As a Black person in America, I always knew that a lot of Black people hated ‘Gone With The Wind,’ and as a Black child, I myself felt injured by the narrative," Randall said. "My book was the equivalent of Prissy slapping Scarlett."

Writing the parody was a way for her—and for her readers—to cope with the trauma of reading Margaret Mitchell’s book and watching the movie it spawned. Randall explores the abandonment a Black girl feels when her biological mother takes care of a white girl. "Mammy was my Mama. Even though she let me go, I miss her," Randall writes in the novel. "Sometimes I comb through my long springy curls and pretend that the hand holding the comb is hers. But I don’t know what that looks like."

But the hands holding the copyright to "Gone With the Wind"—Mitchell’s heirs—thought Randall’s parody looked too much like the original. The Mitchell estate sued to block its publication. In April 2001, U.S. District Judge Charles Pannell blocked the publication of the novel, writing that it "constitutes unabated piracy of ‘Gone With the Wind.’"

But "The Wind Done Gone" wasn’t gone for long.

Just one month later, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction, saying the order "amounts to an unlawful prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment." That year, Randall’s book hit The New York Times’ bestseller list. But the legal fight had left Randall shaken.

"The attempt by the Mitchell estate to use the copyright laws to effect censorship was shocking and chilling, but I did not allow that to stop me," she says.

In fact, Alice Randall is the only African American woman ever to write a number-one country song. She recorded more than twenty songs. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her work includes the only known recorded country songs to explore the subject of lynching (Mark O'Connor's "The Ballad of Sally Anne" ), mention Aretha Franklin in the same line as Patsy Cline (Trisha Yearwood's "Xxx's and Ooo's (An American Girl)" ), and give tribute to both the slave dead and the Confederate dead ("I'll Cry for Yours, Will You Cry for Mine?").

She’s now writing what she calls a "guide to country music in cyberspace."

Well villagers ... I hope you enjoyed our afrocentric twist on the Manic Monday meme!