Revisionist History, Revised

I remember that this book made a splash when it came out in 2001. Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone is billed as "the unauthorized parody" of Gone With the Wind. I didn't think it was so much a parody as a look through a different lens at Margaret Mitchell's famous ode to the Confederacy.

The story is told through the journals of Cindy (Cynara, Cinnamon) a former slave and illegitimate daughter of Planter, the owner of the plantation Tata. Cindy's birth mother is Mammy, wet nurse to Other -- Planter's eldest daughter. Much of the narrative revolves around Mammy's abandonment of her own daughter in favor of the master's child, and the complex relationship Cindy had with her half sister.

Sold as an adolescent, Cindy had several owners including Beauty, the madame of an Atlanta brothel and ultimately the Southern gentleman R.B. He makes Cindy his concubine at the tender age of 15 and marries her half sister several years later. Now 29, with the war over and subsequent Reconstruction doing an about-face, Cindy is looking back at her life and attempting to find some meaning in it.

If you are familiar with Gone With the Wind either from the book or the movie, you'll enjoy the "aha" moments in The Wind Done Gone. What I found compelling, and what made this book controversial, is that through this well-known story, Randall explodes notions of racial purity and strips some veneer from our perception of "civilized" society. Her work of fiction contains echoes of the ongoing struggle for historic recognition by the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his slave/lover Sally Hemings.

The writing shines. It is a quick and enjoyable read, with some important messages embedded within the story. I recommend this book.

(Cross-posted at the Spring Reading Challenge)

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles ...

... and don't forget buses. I spent a few days last week visiting my daughter in Pittsburgh. I'm not a big fan of flying, and we can't afford it anyway, so I took good old Amtrak. It's great: you get on the train in the evening in Chicago, go to sleep, and you wake up in Pittsburgh. Same thing going back, for only $120 round trip. Then there is a bus that runs from Union Station in Chicago to Madison, where I live. Easy peasy. Right?

Last Friday when I was coming home, the train was delayed getting into Chicago, causing me to miss the first bus to Madison. No problem. I got something to eat and went out to catch the next bus two hours later.

There was a line waiting to board the bus. The driver was arranging the luggage underneath. I was literally the next person in line when a police officer walked up and arrested the driver. Handcuffed her and everything! Led her away, leaving 55 people stranded and not knowing what was going on.

Here is what had happened according to some other passengers: A few minutes before I got there, the bus driver got into an altercation with someone who wanted to board the bus. She refused him service. He got in her face. Someone called the police, and the passenger told them that the driver had hit him. They placed both the driver and the passenger under arrest.

Now, the driver was a white woman and the passenger was a black man. Several other African-American passengers were saying that the driver started it by yelling at the man when he was simply asking her an innocent question. One of them said that they were going to file a complaint against her. Not surprisingly, other Caucasian passengers were saying that the driver was just doing what was within her rights when a passenger threatens her. I didn't know what to think. I just wanted to get home, and I must say I was unimpressed with both the police -- who I think escalated the situation -- and the bus company, who essentially did nothing.

Forty minutes later the driver was released. The passenger admitted that he had fabricated the story about her hitting him because he was angry. The driver was visibly shaken (turns out the police had threatened her) and probably embarrassed. The other man was released as well, though he did not come back to the bus. After a few more delays, including the driver not being able to find the keys because a police officer had taken them (!), we were on our way, delayed by a good hour or more.

I forgot to mention that it was snowing during all of this. As we drove northwest, we hit a stretch where the road was very icy, with cars in ditches everywhere. The driver was competent and though we had to creep along, we made it safely past that part.

By this time we were going to be at least 2 hours late. But the roads cleared and we were making good time. I even called my husband to let him know he could meet me at the Park & Ride in half an hour. When. traffic. stopped. Completely. What the...? The driver stood up, craned her neck to see past the long line of cars and trucks ahead of us, and then says, "It looks like there is a car on fire up there!" I stand up and look. Sure enough, an SUV was by the side of the interstate with flames shooting out of it and black smoke billowing into the sky.

We sat for 30 minutes, while the rescue vehicles and about 10 state troopers' cars came. It was during this time that the driver started talking about the arrest. As she talked, it occurred to me that it was lot like the story of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone saw a different part of the situation, nobody saw the whole picture.

This was the driver's story: She was crawling around under the bus, loading in the luggage. The passenger walked up and asked her a question: "Does this bus go to Beloit?" or something like that. In backing out of the luggage compartment to respond to him, she smacked her head - hard - on the compartment door and she said, "GODDAMMIT!" The man got mad and said, "Don't talk to me like that!" The driver -- a rather petite woman -- said that when he got in her face she got scared. She said she has had to deal with abusive passengers before, and when you're out on the highway (and you're a small woman,) it is scary. So she told him he couldn't board the bus. She had no idea that what the passenger was reacting to was her exclamation of pain. He clearly had no idea that she had just whacked her head so hard.

So she, another passenger, and I were putting all of this together. The driver commented, "Now I feel really bad about that passenger. He must have thought I was really a jerk!" I thought the whole thing was an interesting (and painful) study in miscommunication and misunderstanding. I wonder how much of a role race played in it. I couldn't help thinking about how it could have been handled differently, and most of the hard feelings avoided.

I got home 3 hours later than I was supposed to, but I have to say that it was an interesting day and gave me a lot of food for thought.