Randall, Alice

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Alice Randall

Personal

Born May 4, 1959, in Detroit, MI; daughter of George (owner of a dry-cleaning business) and Bettie (a government analyst) Randall; married (divorced); married second husband, David Ewing (an attorney), c. 1997; children: (first marriage) Caroline. Education: Harvard University, B.A. (English and American literature; with honors), 1981. Hobbies and other interests: Collecting antiques, documenting African-American history.

Addresses

Home— Nashville, TN. Agent— c/o Houghton Mifflin Co., 215 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10003. E-mail— [email protected].

Career

Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center, Vienna, VA, writer, c. 1982; country music songwriter in Nashville, TN, 1983—; songs recorded by various artists, including Steve Earle and Trisha Yearwood. Active in local museums and historical and community organizations involved in preserving the history of the enslaved, including the African-American Historical and Genealogical Association, Andrew Jackson Slave Descendent Project, and Family Cemetery Project.

Awards, Honors

Numerous songs ranked in top ten, Billboard country music charts, including number-one hit "XXX's and OOO's: An American Girl"; Al Neuharth Free Spirit Award, 2001; Literature Award of Excellence, Memphis Black Writers Conference, 2002.

Writings

(With John Wilder) XXX's and OOO's (teleplay; movie), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 1994.

The Wind Done Gone, Houghton (Boston, MA), 2001.

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Houghton (Boston, MA), 2004.

Contributor to screenplay adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Brer Rabbit, and Parting the Waters. Also author of over thirty recorded songs, including "XXXs and OOO's: An American Girl," recorded by Tricia Yearwood; "The Ballad of Sally Ann"; and "I'll Cry for Yours, Will You Cry for Mine?"

Sidelights

Country music songwriter-turned-novelist Alice Randall became one of the most publicized writers in the United States in early 2001, despite the fact that her debut novel, The Wind Done Gone, had yet to arrive on bookstore shelves. The estate of late novelist Margaret Mitchell filed a lawsuit, Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Company, to protect the copyright of Mitchell's 1936 blockbuster novel Gone with the Wind against infringement by Randall's publisher. The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of the U.S. Civil War-era saga of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler from an ex-slave's point of view, was defended by Houghton Mifflin, as well as by a number of writers, academics, and others who came to the book's defense, proclaiming Randall's novel a parody and therefore free from copyright restrictions. The Mitchell estate, which has authorized only one sequel to Mitchell's novel, is entitled to control Gone with the Wind as a creative work until the copyright expires in 2036. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Randall was raised in Washington, D.C., and attended Harvard University. During her time at Harvard she fell in love with country music, recalling to Entertainment Weekly contributor Troy Patterson, "I took a screenwriting class, and I was spending a couple days typing a 110-page script, and I got so bored with whatever pop-rock radio station I was listening to that I decided to turn on the country station. It was a joke, something to distract me. And I was immediately struck that there was this Metaphysical . . . quality to some of the strategy in country lyrics." Randall moved to Nashville, Tennessee, after college graduation to pursue a career as a songwriter. Her success in her chosen profession has been highlighted by the fact that Randall was the first African-American woman song-writer credited with penning a number-one-ranked country song. She is also noted for weaving feminist, literary, and cultural references into her lyrics, references that are not the usual "stuff" of country music. Randall's "Many Mansions," recorded in 1989 by singer Moe Bandy and written in collaboration with Carol Ann Etheridge, contains a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, while "A Hundred Years of Solitude," written with Michael Woody and recorded by his band the Woodys, is a reference to Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Perhaps her most famous songwriting collaboration, "XXX's and OOO's: An American Girl," which she wrote with singer Matraca Berg, became a numberone hit for country superstar Tricia Yearwood in 1994, and it was used as the theme for a television movie coauthored by Randall that aired the same year on CBS-TV.

Questioning Mitchell's Work

Randall encountered Mitchell's famous novel when she was about twelve years old. An avid reader, she dove into the book, but soon realized that Mitchell's perspective writing as a white Southerner in the early 1930s was far different than that of a preteen living in a major urban area during the civil rights era. For one thing, there were no mulattos mentioned in the book, and Randall's solid grounding in history—as well as the fact that her own mixed-race heritage stretches back to that era—alerted her to the book's racial bias. For another, as she told People contributor Christina Cheakolos, "I didn't know there were 'nice' people who thought blacks were subhuman until I read Gone with the Wind." Several decades later Randall determined to revisit Gone with the Wind and dispel the aura surrounding what she saw as a racist cultural icon. "Randall needed to take on Mitchell's work directly to undermine its myths, make readers question its world, and explode the archetypes that have leapt off its pages into America's consciousness," explained a Houghton Mifflin informational press release regarding the resulting law suit. "To confront Mitchell's work directly and to make her parody convincing, Randall had to pay attention to the particulars of Mitchell's novel."

The Wind Done Gone tells the story of Scarlett and Rhett through the personal diaries of Cynara, Scarlett's mulatto half-sister. Fathered by Tara's owner and Scarlett's own father, Mr. Gerald O'Hara, and born to the ebony house slave known as "Mammy," Cynara grows up knowing her half-sister only as Other, and she feels differently than does her sister about the plantation she calls "Tata." Ashley and Melanie Wilkes also make an appearance in Cynara's long-running diary under the names "Dreamy Gentleman" and "Mealy Mouth." Rhett Butler, who is referred to only as "R," ultimately becomes Cynara's lover after he is spurned by the hot-tempered Scarlett.

A Troubling Lawsuit

In their lawsuit, the Mitchell Trust cited the wholesale theft of major characters as their cause of action and argued that publication of Randall's book would violate a creative artist's protection under the law. It was a charge attorneys for Houghton denied, citing The Wind Done Gone 's status as a sociopolitical parody rather than an act of plagiarism. As the case drew the interest of the nation's literary establishment, a number of intellectuals joined in defending the publication of Randall's novel, among them noted Civil War historian Shelby Foote, The Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Many testified on behalf of the defense or introduced "friend of the court" briefs defending Houghton Mifflin's position.

Copyright laws are a creation of modern times, and they place restrictions on a literary tradition in which reconfiguring works by others has been commonplace. "Thank the gods that copyright law was not discovered in the Iron Age," a Time writer commented. "If it had been, . . . the vast trove of Western literature derived or extrapolated from the Iliad and Odyssey— including Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Tennyson's Ulysses, Joyce's Ulysses— might not exist." However,

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others argued against treating the novel as an anonymous classic, such as the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the classical myths, or the legend of King Arthur. "A novel copyrighted in 1936 has been turned into a myth of antiquity," wrote National Review columnist Florence King, "like Andromeda or Beowulf, too shrouded by the veils of time for anyone to state with certainty who the original author was, and ripe for plucking by any bard who feels like fiddling with it."

The push to publish The Wind Done Gone is founded more on politics and race than the work's literary merits, continued King, reacting to the "Letter of Support" released on April 10, 2001, with the signatures of thirty noted intellectuals. The letter included the statement: "The discussion of the painful legacy of slavery is ongoing among American citizens across the nation. Because of the extraordinary popularity of Gone with the Wind and its unique mythic status, Mitchell's novel has become a prime source of knowledge about plantation life for much of mainstream America. Now is the time for the American public to hear another perspective on this legend." King noted that, despite criticism to the contrary, Mitchell does address miscegenation and the existence of mulattos in chapter 25 of her book, albeit briefly. Her avoidance of the issue may well have had as much to do with the moral tolerance of the 1930s reading public as it did with racism; in any case, King explained, Mitchell told her story selectively: "She avoided distracting subplots and irrelevant digressions, [and] crafted a coherent story by sticking to Scarlett's viewpoint" for over 1,000 pages of text.

Sifting loose all such literary and political subplots in an examination of the law surrounding the matter, in mid-April 2001 a U.S. District Court judge ordered that publication of The Wind Done Gone be halted, ruling that Randall's novel was a retelling of Mitchell's book using the same characters and settings. Noting in his ruling, as quoted on MSNBC.com, that Randall's "recitation" of much of the plot of Gone with the Wind is "overwhelming," Judge Charles A. Pannel, Jr. added: "When the reader of Gone with the Wind turns over the last page, he may well wonder what becomes of Ms. Mitchell's beloved characters and their romantic, but tragic, world. Ms. Randall has offered her vision of how to answer those unanswered questions. . . . The right to answer those questions, however, legally belongs to Mrs. Mitchell's heirs, not Ms. Randall."

After the court handed down its injunction preventing the scheduled June 2001 publication of The Wind Done Gone from taking place, Houghton's lawyers appealed the decision, and their appeal was heard in an Atlanta court on May 25. Meanwhile, advance copies of the book were already in circulation, prompting the fear that the book might ultimately see unauthorized publication on the Internet. In the hands of reviewers long before the legal battle began, these advance copies spawned reviews, some of which appeared on editorial pages. In the Washington Post, Ellen Goodman announced that she planned to send her advance copy to the judge, surprised that the court had not seen the work as a parody. "Ashley is gay, . . . and Belle is running a whorehouse filled with lesbians, and this is not a parody? It may not be a comedy, but Randall has written a story turning the world of Tara into Tata, creating . . . leading roles for former slaves." "This book you cannot read," continued Goodman, "is fictional commentary, at times clever, at times obvious, at times arresting, at times flat, but always pointed like a cannon at the original."

Several reviewers agreed with Goodman that Randall's debut was uneven, but also agreed that its literary merits were sufficient to warrant its publication. Calling Gone with the Wind an "impregnable fortress" and The Wind Done Gone a "shack," Entertainment Weekly contributor Lisa Schwarzbaum nonetheless concluded of the controversy surrounding the publication of the novel: "Maybe the greater purpose squatter-artist Alice Randall serves, whether her book sees print or not, is this: By her very presence on the grounds of the citadel, she's a reminder that a battle for racial and artistic freedom is still being fought."

Moving Forward

The appeal of Houghton Mifflin was heard on May 25, 2001, in Atlanta, and the injunction against publication was lifted, freeing the publisher to release The Wind Done Gone according to schedule. In 2002, the estate of Margaret Mitchell reached an out-of-court settlement with Houghton Mifflin and the lawsuit was dropped in agreement that the publisher make a donation to Morehouse College, a black Atlanta school long supported by the Mitchell estate.

The controversy had a profound effect on Randall. "It was shocking," she told Boston Globe contributor David Mehegan, "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." Randall told Douglas Danoff in Essence that, despite her own fears about the lawsuit, it was important to serve as a role model for her daughter: "I wanted to teach her that you have to do the right thing. You may be scared, but you still have to go forward courageously."

If you enjoy the works of Alice Randall

If you enjoy the works of Alice Randall, you may also want to check out the following books:

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936.

Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett, 1991.

Percival Everett, Erasure, 2001.

In 2004 Randall published her second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, a "profoundly moving look at the complexities of race and family in the context of one woman's search for reconciliation and redemption," according to Booklist reviewer Vanessa Bush. The work centers on the relationship between Windsor Armstrong, a Harvard-educated, African-American professor of Russian literature, and her son, Pushkin X, a professional football player who wishes to marry Tanya, a Russian-born exotic dancer. Pushkin's decision stuns his mother, who named her only child after Malcolm X and Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, the great grandson of an African slave. According to Gayle Pemberton, writing in the Women's Review of Books, "Windsor's plans for Pushkin included neither the NFL—he was to have a Harvard education to match hers—nor a white wife." As she struggles to understand her son's choices, Windsor begins to question her own beliefs about racism and elitism. By examining her troubled, complicated history, Windsor "takes her son and the reader on journeys back through her life and those of relatives and significant neighbors, charting the vexed, menaced, and sometimes

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absent love of black people for themselves and their own," remarked Pemberton. "Windsor's self-questioning can be frustratingly circular," observed a Publishers Weekly critic, "but even when her rhetoric runs away with her, her restless search for answers is stimulating."

Randall lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, attorney David Ewing, and her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, great-granddaughter of Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps. "One of the things I like about my writing life is that I live in the middle of the country," she told Mehegan. "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."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Black Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, September 11, 2001, Fred Goss, "Gay with the Wind," p. 63.

Booklist, February 15, 2004, Vanessa Bush, review of Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, p. 1004.

Boston Globe, June 12, 2004, David Mehegan, "Alice Randall Uncensored"; Joanne A. Skerrett, August 10, 2004, " Pushkin Is Profound, Provocative."

Ebony, October, 2001, "Author Goes on a Cruzade," p. 3.

Entertainment Weekly, June 24, 1994, Ken Tucker, review of XXX's and OOO's (television movie), pp. 89-90; May 18, 2001, Lisa Schwarzbaum, "'Wind' Storm: Forget Legalities: We Assess Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone Solely on Its Literary Merits," p. 26; July 27, 2001, Troy Patterson, "The 'Wind' Mill: A Gone with the Wind Parodist Hosts a Showdown in Margaret Mitchell's Backyard," p. 22; April 30, 2004, Troy Patterson, "Second 'Wind': Her Margaret Mitchell Parody Kicked up a Firestorm," p. 169.

Essence, August, 2004, Douglas Danoff, "Alice Randall: Act Two," p. 124.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2004, review of Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, p. 294.

Library Journal, March 15, 2004, Rebecca Stuhr, review of Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, pp. 108-109.

Nation, May 21, 2001, Patricia J. Williams, "The Stochastic Aptitude Test," p. 11.

National Review, May 14, 2001, Florence King, "Misanthrope's Corner."

New York Times, April 8, 2001, Marjorie Garber, "The Chapter after 'The End,'" p. WK15; April 30, 2001, Lawrence Lessig, "Let the Stories Go: Gone with the Wind Should Be in the Public Domain," p. A19; May 1, 2001, "Gone with the First Amendment," p. A22.

Orlando Sentinel, August 27, 2001, Nancy Pate, "A Conversation with Alice Randall."

People, Christina Cheakolos, "Wind Storm: A Court Blocks Author Alice Randall's Bid to Publish a Slave's-Eye View of Tara," pp. 91-92.

Publishers Weekly, Calvin Reid, "Suit Done Gone, for Now," p. 17; March 1, 2004, review of Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, p. 46.

Time, May 7, 2001, "The Birth of a Novel: Is a Black Version of Gone with the Wind Parody or Plagiarism? And Why You Should Give a Damn," p. 74.

Washington Post, April 26, 2001, Jed Rubenfeld, "A New Take on the Plantation," p. A27; May 5, 2001, Ellen Goodman, "A Right to Mock Tara," p. A19.

Washington Post Book World, May 30, 2004, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, "Black Russian," p. 8.

Women's Review of Books, July, 2004, Gayle Pemberton, "Menaced Love," pp. 5-6.