Speaking out about the drive to stop her first novel, the author shares lessons from writing her second

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff, 6/12/2004

Alice Randall set the book world on its ear three years ago with "The Wind Done Gone," her daring first-novel parody of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind." That world was frantic to meet her and talk to her, but because the Mitchell estate tried to legally block the book's publication, publisher Houghton Mifflin's cautious lawyers had her virtually gagged -- she never had a normal book tour or round of interviews.

Now Randall, 45, is in Boston for a reading from her second novel, "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades," and after a lively interview at the Bristol

Lounge in the Four Seasons Hotel, it's clear how hard on her that enforced silence was. "It was shocking," she said of the attempt to block the book, "hard to imagine a book could be stopped. A lot of older black people experienced it as a black voice being silenced. It was an intellectual awakening for me that the copyright act can be used for censorship." A federal judge in April 2001 accepted the Mitchell estate's claim that the book violated copyright, since it had characters suggested by the 1936 blockbuster, and issued a restraining order against Houghton Mifflin. If the estate had won its lawsuit, all copies of the book, including the original manuscript, could have been ordered destroyed. But in May 2001, a three-judge appeals court overruled the lower court and cleared the book for publication. Bubbling with verbal energy, Randall's animated voice, face, and hands work together in a kind of expression engine -- she seems to talk with her whole body. It pours out of her in a flood of words: American justice, the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, "Gone With the Wind," F. Scott Fitzgerald, Merle Haggard, Zora Neale Hurston, the "post-Brown" world of African-Americans, and about what it's like to be a Harvard-educated black female country-western songwriter, novelist, wife, mom, and volunteer teacher, with a vacuum-cleaner reading appetite. "Alice is a force of nature," said Wendy J. Strothman, former senior vice president of Houghton Mifflin.

"The Wind Done Gone" retold the story of "Gone With the Wind" from the point of view of its black characters, inverting almost everything

in the story. The black characters are fleshed out, while the white characters are cartoonish. The blacks have much of the real power, though the whites don't know it. The black narrator, Cynara, is the half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara. "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades" is very different, though also written in a black woman's voice. At heart, it's clear that Randall and her protagonist, Windsor Armstrong, have much in common. Both were born in Detroit of fathers in the dry-cleaning business. Both moved to Washington, D.C., with their mothers when their parents divorced. Both went to elite private Washington schools (Randall to Georgetown Day School from fourth grade through high school), then on to Harvard. But there the parallels end. Windsor is raped just before entering Harvard, resists her mother's pressure to have an abortion, and gives birth to a son she names Pushkin X., after the Russian poet, whose great-grandfather was an African slave. The identity of her son's father -- a key plot element -- is revealed late in the novel. Windsor becomes a professor of Russian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and her grown-up son first disappoints her by becoming a professional football star, then shocks her by proposing to marry Tanya, a Russian-born stripper.

Randall has no son but has a 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, who is a student at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. The writer graduated from Harvard in 1981 with honors and a degree in English and American literature. (Her senior thesis: "Mothers and Daughters in the Novels of Jane Austen.") "I loved Harvard," she said -- especially its libraries, and she immersed herself in courses with such luminaries as Nathan Huggins and Harry Levin. A fanatical reader, she says she reads five to seven books per week, a claim confirmed by Anton Mueller, her Houghton Mifflin editor.

But rather than have an elite post-Harvard career, she moved to Nashville to pursue a dream of writing country-western songs. "She was the first woman black country-western songwriter," said her Harvard classmate David Feinberg of Chestnut Hill. "Everyone at Harvard was going off to be doctors and lawyers, and here she was writing country songs. That's Alice. She's a totally brilliant, spirited, zany, wonderful person. You would expect her to choose the less-traveled road."

She has published at least 200 songs, she says, and about 30 have been recorded, including "Blinded by Stars," sung by Adrienne Young on her recent CD "Plow to the End of the Row." Married to attorney David Steele Ewing, a second marriage for her, she is a volunteer teacher in Nashville-area schools.

In 1999, Randall was asked to give a talk at Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, a working museum of antebellum life, about an exhibition of costumes used in the film "Gone With the Wind." The talk was to address the historical accuracy of the costumes. She gave the talk but found the request unsettling. "People wanted to know if the portrayal of costumes was accurate," she said, "but the deeper question was, `Is the portrayal of people and relationships accurate?' Or, `Why are there no mulatto children in the book?' "

Right away, she said, she began to write "The Wind Done Gone," partly so that her daughter would have something to read against "Gone With the Wind." She knew that the latter book, which still represents the image of the antebellum South in white America, as well as around the world, had caused pain to African-American readers because of its grossly racist depiction of black characters. "Thousands of readers do not know that reading `Gone With the Wind' is traumatic for many black readers," she said.

"I had no commercial intent. I didn't sell the book for a lot of money -- I never even had an agent." What she did have was a longtime friendship with Mueller, senior editor of Houghton Mifflin, who was delighted when she sent him the manuscript.

"I consider her to be the smartest person I have ever met," Mueller said. "Because `Gone With the Wind' was a piece of popular fiction, it was beneath the attention of those in the literary establishment -- Toni Morrison was not going to take it on [though Morrison filed a statement with the court supporting Randall]. But Alice could see that it had had a profound effect on the African-American community and it deserved to be critiqued. That she was able to write it and have it be as good as it was, the first time she ever tried to write a book, was amazing."

She filled the story with signals it was a parody, and was furious at the Mitchell estate's allegation that it was intended as a sequel. In the first paragraph, Cynara writes, "I think maybe my emeralds are just green glass; I hope maybe they be genuine peridot" -- i.e., the work is a genuine parody. It was also filled with African-American folk references that would have been unthinkable in a sequel.

"It was critical to our success to have Alice decode the numerous metaphors and allusions to slave and African-American culture," said Joseph Beck, a First Amendment lawyer in Atlanta who argued the case for Randall and Houghton Mifflin. "Her sophisticated parody was not the sort of thing we've grown accustomed to in programs such as `Saturday Night Live.' Her explanation helped us see why `The Wind Done Gone' was truly, as in the Greek, `para ode' -- another story -- about the South and plantation life."

The book is now taught in literary parody classes at 17 universities. To Randall's great satisfaction, it is also sold in the shop at Belle Meade Plantation.

Randall was eager to defend her book but doesn't deny she was scared to death by the suit. "They were suing me for $10 million. That was my house, my daughter's education. My husband is seven years younger than me and black, and he expected to get justice. But I grew up in a world where black people still could not get justice."

Randall was thrilled by the support she received from all sorts of people who agreed that "Gone With the Wind" had been hurtful and needed to be confronted. Besides the famous writers, from Pat Conroy to Henry Louis Gates Jr., many ordinary African-American readers thanked her then and later. She said, "The two things that touched me were a note from [songwriter and arranger] Quincy Jones, sending me flowers and asking, `Whose legs do I need to break?' -- which made me cry because it would have been my father's response had he been alive -- and Harper Lee [author of the classic "To Kill a Mockingbird"] signing a petition on my behalf." Lee later wrote a long supportive letter to Randall.

The center of Randall's new novel is a sophisticated black woman's pain at her son's choice of a white woman for a wife, and her agonized reflection on her own freedom and that of her son's. It's about letting go of expectations and realizing that her son's generation doesn't share her history or her pains. At the same time, it's a meditation on the African strain in Alexander Pushkin, which disappears in succeeding generations, and about the theme of family love and loyalty.

"This book is not autobiographical," she said, "but is thematically resonant with my own biography. I lived in the places Windsor lived. I lived [in Detroit] in so much an all-black community that I went to an all-black school. When I heard someone say, `White folks always keep you down,' I thought `whitefolks' was a person. I said, `Who is whitefolks?' "

She recalls a childhood conversation that is echoed in the book. "My father told me a story about a pimp he knew who had a vicious guard dog named `Whitefolks.' He said, `Whitefolks' ain't nothing but a broken-down black pimp's dog.' That is protective racism. There is something grandiose and untrue in it, also true and transformative. Windsor moves away from that kind of racism. I have completely moved away from that kind of racism."

Still, Windsor agonizes. The first sentence of the book -- "Look what they done to my boy!" -- paraphrases the grieved comment of Mamie Till Bradley in 1955, at the funeral of her lynched teenager Emmett Till: "Let them see what they have done to my boy."

Writing the story of Windsor, Pushkin, and Tanya "has made my heart bigger," Randall said. "As much as I love blackness and cultural blackness, I really felt the tug of Tanya's love for Pushkin. My ex-husband, after our divorce, married someone who is white. What does that tell my daughter, particularly when 50 percent of black, college-educated woman are not getting married today who want to get married? I worry about that, but ultimately we must treat everyone's erotic-romantic choices as their own. I have to move to accept love where it is seen." Writing the book taught her "to allow my child to make her own choices, and to allow black men to make their own choices."

"Pushkin and the Queen of Spades" is part two of a triptych, Randall says. The third book, also written in the first person, will focus on a work of Shakespeare. She already has a book in mind after that, and seems not to agonize about her writing career.

"One of the things I like about my writing life is that I live in the middle of the country," she said. "It's not about schmoozing with writers. My life is grounded in the typical life of women in America. When I'm not writing, I'm taking care of family. I adore my husband. I love being a mommy."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 6/12/2004. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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