Meanwhile, in the Atlanta courtroom, Judge Pannell was considering a statement from the novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who asked, "Who controls how history is imagined? Who gets to say what slavery was like for the slaves?" An expert witness for the defense, Morrison was treating Randall's novel -- which depicts some of the story of "Gone With the Wind" from the perspective of the slaves at Tara -- in much the same way McElvaine used "Gone With the Wind": as an idea about Southern history so powerful that it might as well be history itself. Judge Pannell would have none of it. "The question before the court," he wrote in his order, "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' in order to correct the 'pain, humiliation and outrage' of the 'a-historical representation' of the previous work, while simultaneously criticizing the antebellum and more recent South."

It was a nice try on the judge's part to seem above the sway of Mitchell's epic novel, but by page 48 of his order, he'd tipped his hand: "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." Indeed, he well may. (It's worth pointing out here that Judge Pannell is a son of the South, born in DeKalb County, Ga., and educated at the University of Georgia.) To Northerners, who tend to see "Gone With the Wind" as a ripe slice of well-aged kitsch, that bit about "their romantic, but tragic, world" sounds a jarringly earnest note (true Mitchell devotees probably winced at the "Ms."); Scarlett O'Hara, flouncing around in her hoop skirts and stamping her pretty slippered feet at the roguish remarks of the impossibly dashing Rhett Butler -- tragic? It's enough to make a Yankee feel as baffled as the New York radio show host who recently grilled a Southern guest about white Southerners' attachment to Confederate emblems like the battle cross. People insist that these symbols stand for something more than just the defense of slavery, he complained, but they never say precisely what that something is.

A few callers rang up and offered the usual vague explanations: It's "heritage," it's "tradition." But what that something really is, I suspect, is a story -- a glorious, enthralling and absolutely essential story, a story so grand that in its shadow actual history and mere reality shrivel up and die. That story has taken many forms, but none more successful or potent than "Gone With the Wind."

And if Mitchell's novel reigns supreme in the South, its influence extends much further. Within a year of its publication in 1936, there were 10 million copies of "Gone With the Wind" in print. With over 25 million copies sold, it's among the five best-selling novels of all time, quite possible the second or third. And then there's the movie ...

Alice Randall herself succumbed to the spell of Mitchell's opus. Before her legal tussle with the Mitchell Trust compelled her to speak incessantly of "The Wind Done Gone" as a "parody" of "Gone With the Wind" and to harshly characterize the earlier novel as "a book that has damaged generations of African-Americans and white readers," she confessed to having first read the novel at age 12 and having "loved" it. That's a remarkable testimony to the hypnotic charm of "Gone With the Wind," a novel so jampacked with the most ludicrous stereotypes of African-Americans, and so profoundly delusional about slavery itself, that no one could blame black readers for throwing it at the wall in disgust. According to an author interview included in the uncorrected proofs of "The Wind Done Gone," what finally provoked Randall to write her own version of the story was the question "Where are the mulattos on Tara?" (Randall herself is reputedly descended from a Confederate general.)

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"