Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010

6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone

149 6 Broke Right in Half Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone Julie Cary Nerad “I have accepted the injustice of all of them loving her different because she was white. If she was just a nigger like me but got the chance to live as white, it’s too much too bear. But maybe that’s just the way it is, so I’m broke. Right in half.” —Cynara (Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone) In “Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South,” Susan V. Donaldson suggests that the cultural shift(s) generated from/in a postmodern, postcolonial, postsegregation world “requires a new kind of historical novel, one that underscores its own provisional status by calling attention to its literary operations—that is, how it goes about representing the past—and that also problematizes history by unearthing discontinui‑ ties, anomalies, and multiple possibilities and by posing alternative content and alternative forms” (270).1 Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001) is just such a novel. In her postmodern re‑vision of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936), Randall tells the story of Cynara Brown, a mixed‑race woman who must reconcile different versions of reality in what she calls this “territory of truth and illusion” (167). Cynara’s journey, recorded as a diary, is not primarily one of physical movement, although she does move from Atlanta, to Washington, D.C., to the eastern 150 / Julie Cary Nerad shore of Maryland. Her story is instead more a record of the develop‑ ment of relationships and the constant reimagining of knowledge—both self‑knowledge and historical knowledge. The story specifically highlights how the construction of history and of reality affects how we construct our own identities. Change history, and we change ourselves. Change ourselves, and we change history. Arguably, it is a lesson modeled within the book for the book’s readers. There is always another truth to be uncovered, while Truth is illusive or perhaps even an illusion. The primary means through which the novel challenges history— and especially the myth of the Old South—is passing, a common trope since the mid‑nineteenth century and one well at home in a neo‑slave narrative.2 That is, Randall reframes history not only by removing Scar‑ lett O’Hara—here named “Other”—from center stage of the American sectional drama, but also by making the white Southern belle black.Tata (Tara), and by extension the plantation South as a whole, is anything but the serene paradise of benevolent white masters and their faithful black slaves that Mitchell’s novel helped write into the cultural imagination. In Randall’s updated version, Scarlett has “black blood”; Mammy is rumored to be a serial murderer; and Ashley Wilkes is presumably gay. Here, people cannot be separated easily into mutually exclusive categories such as black and white, and slavery and freedom are not primarily about legal status. Because of its postmodern, transgressive reimagining of a myth that has influenced American culture so deeply that it seems to many to be history—to be fact rather than fiction—the novel itself has also had to depend upon the strategy of passing. In order to see print, that is, the novel has been marketed as a parody, a move that dulls the edge of Randall’s textual blade and thus blunts the impact of her assault on the residue of racism in American popular culture. This essay explores how cultural resistance to the passing within Randall’s postmodern text—which proceeds through the blackening of a white cultural icon—demands the passing of the text as a parody, evidencing a continuing anxiety about race and the control of America’s racial history in the twenty‑first‑century United States. Passing as Parody The Wind Done Gone is regularly described as a parody of Gone With the Wind. Indeed, its cover boasts that it is “The Unauthorized Parody” and claims The New York Times best‑seller to be “a provocative literary parody Broke Right in Half /   151 that explodes the mythology perpetrated by a Southern classic.” Randall herself identifies her first novel as a parody that answers the question: Where are all the mulatto characters in Mitchell’s novel? Houghton Mif‑ flin defends the novel it published explicitly as a parody and not a sequel, defining for the Web site’s readers the terms thus: The...