Gone with Copyright Protection?

As Dan Gillmor reported in the Mercury News, U.S. District Judge Charles A. Pannell issued a preliminary injunction against the publication of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind. Gillmor properly laments the extremes to which copyright protection has gone.

This particular ruling is especially disheartening because Gone with the Wind is, of all books, most deserving of a parody. Its unbelievable tale of Reconstruction in the South has done more harm than people know.

For example, in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (co-authored by Alex Haley, author of Roots, and a wonderful writer), Malcolm recalls seeing the movie of Gone with the Wind as a teen and being mortified by its portrayal of his race. He slid down in his seat while watching Butterfly McQueen, an excellent Black actress, be forced to act an idiot and say "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthing babies." What female slave could ever credibly make such a statement? Of course, that character, who would have watched many babies being born among the slave population, would have known everything about birthin' babies, and, of course, Scarlett O'Hara would have been the one who knew nothin'. (Mitchell even named Butterfly McQueen's character Prissy, but nobody could ever have been as prissy as Scarlett O'Hara.) But such is Hollywood, and such is the racism underlying the romantic premise of the whole novel. The story line cries out for the kind of correction a good parody provides.

For those who can't wait for the resolution of the legal case about The Wind Done Gone, I have a book to recommend. Jubilee, a wonderful novel by Margaret Walker, a great African-American author, is not a parody, but it is an antidote to Gone with the Wind. The two main characters of Jubilee are the illegitimate Black and legitimate White daughters of the owner of a Southern plantation. Vyry, the Black daughter, is raised in the slave quarters; the White daughter, whose name escapes me, is raised in the house, with all the privileges of the plantation class.

Its structure is like an experiment with the Black daughter as the variable and the White daughter as the control. When the Civil War comes along, and Reconstruction thereafter, it's clear which daughter has the skills to survive hardship. (It's also a wonderful novel for teenagers to read, especially teenaged girls.)

When I taught eleventh-grade English in a mostly Black Boston high school in the 1970s, one of the major networks ran a big promotion around their showing of the movie version of Gone with the Wind. I made the class watch that show and assigned Jubilee at the same time. Everyone could see in the contrast of the two works the racism inherent in Gone with the Wind. Thus armed, they laughed at Gone with the Wind. If a parody had been available, I would have assigned it next.

Parody plays an important role in the development and understanding of a culture. Making its expression less important than the property rights of the estate of a dead author is not just an intellectual property problem: It's the death of our culture and the beginning of the end of democracy and free speech.

And I don't like Clark Gable, either.