Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind

1. Designs against Tara: Representing Slavery in American Culture, 1936–1944

20 1 Designs against Tara representing slavery in american culture, 1936–1944 n 2001, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone—a parodic rejoinder to Margaret Mitchell’s perennially popular 1936 melodrama, Gone with the Wind—reignited cultural debates about representations of race and slavery in American fiction, as well as legal controversies about the acceptable limits of postmodern intertextuality. Some critics made grandiose claims for The Wind Done Gone, one asserting that“Randall has achieved what some might have deemed impossible: She has burst the bubble of a cherished American myth, exposing the inherent racism and injustice of a chunk of Americana that has loomed over the landscape of our popular fiction for 65 years” (Goss 1). The trust that owns the copyright to Gone with the Wind was rather less impressed, however, and promptly brought suit against Randall for unauthorized use of Mitchell’s creations. At the hearing, Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr. refused to consider debates about unequal access to historical discourse.“The question before the court,” he proclaimed,“is not who gets to write history, but rather whether Ms. Randall can permeate most of her new critical work with the copyrighted characters, plot, and scenes from Gone with the Wind” (quoted in Miller 1). Both the legal wrangling and the critical praise for Randall’s puncturing of racist myths suggest that The Wind Done Gone stages an innovative challenge to a once-hegemonic discourse about slavery and race in American culture. Conventional wisdom suggests that such counternarratives to the official historical record are very much a product of contemporary culture and postmodernism. According to such a view, there is little that is subverI calls and responses 21 sive in the traditional historical novel. This critical orthodoxy has diverted literary scholars from a full appreciation and proper examination of dissenting historical counternarratives produced by novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. In his comprehensive study, Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture , William Van Deburg provides a sharp critique of Gone with the Wind as both book and film, but he refers only in passing to a powerful and subversive novel about slavery by an African American writer published the very same year as Mitchell’s opus—Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder, a dramatic recreation of the Richmond slave rebellion of 1800.Van Deburg also glosses over a striking fictional portrayal of slavery and insurrection produced by a white writer in this era: he buries in his footnotes a single passing reference to Frances Gaither’s impressive tale of an 1835 slave revolution in Mississippi , The Red Cock Crows (1944) (104–6, 125–27, 206). While largely neglected by literary scholarship, Black Thunder and The Red Cock Crows vividly demonstrate that both black and white writers in the 1930s and 1940s challenged romanticized representations of slavery and racist constructions of slave psychologies long before the emergence of postmodernism or the modern civil rights movement. Both Black Thunder and The Red Cock Crows oppose the unashamedly white southern view of slavery presented in such works of history as Ulrich B. Phillips’s American Negro Slavery (1918) and later popularized by Mitchell’s novel. Contrary to his late-nineteenth-century New England predecessors and his African American contemporaries in the discipline of history , Phillips argues that American slaves were“by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited paternalism rather than repression.” For Phillips, the authority of the slaveholder was“benevolent in intent and on the whole beneficial in effect,” and relations between masters and slaves “on both sides were felt to be based on pleasurable responsibility ” (341–42, 328, 329). The fictions of Bontemps and Gaither dispute that slavery was such a harmonious system and that enslaved African Americans were loyal and content. Instead, their novels present slave populations that actively desire freedom and whose members are prepared to take daring and revolutionary steps to achieve it. If Black Thunder and The Red Cock Crows persuasively critique the Phildesigns against tara calls and responses 22 lips view of slavery, they are, unfortunately, insufficient as counternarratives to his famous literary successor. Gone with the Wind’s construction of slavery is rather more complex than the traditional white southern paternalist racism of Phillips’s historical study. Bontemps’s and Gaither’s novels fail to rival the mythic...