The dispute between Randall's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, and the Mitchell trust boiled down to an argument over whether "The Wind Done Gone" is a parody or an unauthorized, unlicensed (and therefore illegal) sequel. It's permissible to use some copyrighted material under "fair use" provisions of the copyright law in certain cases, parody being one of them. Determining fair use is always a tricky, fuzzy process, but finally Judge Pannell decided that "The Wind Done Gone" doesn't qualify as parody because a parody seeks only to criticize the original work and "does not gain the protection of the fair use doctrine if it merely uses the protected work as a means to ridicule another object," i.e., "other general concepts and ideas about the way black Americans have been and are treated in the South." He also determined that Randall's novel "merely encapsulates the same story while adding new twists" and that in seeking to correct Mitchell's version of Southern history, it "uses too much copyrighted material in doing so."

In other words, "The Wind Done Gone" is simultaneously not enough about "Gone With the Wind" and too much like it. Randall and her publisher can be forgiven for finding Judge Pannell's order maddening, but a reading of "The Wind Done Gone" explains the judge's tortuous and cranky interpretation. Randall's novel feels like a former lover's obsessively detailed and exhaustive catalog of her ex's faults; it has neither the giddy, lofty scorn of true parody nor the independence of the "brilliant rejoinder" its flap copy professes it to be.

In "The Wind Done Gone," every humiliating incident in "Gone With the Wind" is painstakingly reworked to portray the slaves and former slaves as covertly pulling the strings at Tata. Pork was won by Gerald O'Hara at a poker game in "Gone With the Wind." Garlic rigs the poker game to transfer himself to Planter's service in "The Wind Done Gone" and then fixes another poker game to win Planter the deed to Tata. The slaves engineer the deaths of Planter's male children in order to maintain their control of the plantation. And the moronic Prissy in Mitchell's novel becomes the fiendishly dissembling Miss Priss in Randall's, feigning idiocy in order to surreptitiously kill off the woman (Mealy Mouth) who ordered Miss Priss' brother beaten to death for revealing his homosexual affair with "the Dreamy Gentleman" (Randall's version of Ashley Wilkes).

Instead of giving her characters their own, separate lives -- a strategy that would truly provide a "rejoinder" to the degrading depictions of blacks in "Gone With the Wind" -- Randall has them infiltrate and usurp the lives of Mitchell's characters. The apogee of this strategy is Cynara's sexual rivalry with Other, and Randall's need to prove that Cynara can steal the headily eroticized romantic hero of "Gone With the Wind" from Mitchell's legendary belle of five counties. That's what Judge Pannell is getting at when he counters Randall's argument that the white characters in "The Wind Done Gone" are "flat" and "one-dimensional." (Randall's point is that her in-depth treatment of black characters, and superficial treatment of white ones, is the reverse of Mitchell's, and that her work is therefore a parody.) "On the contrary," he retorts, "Other's role in 'The Wind Done Gone,' just like Scarlett in 'Gone With the Wind,' does not cause the reader to ignore her but, rather, demands that the reader pay attention to her and how her life impacts other people around her." In other words, the only real alternative to "Gone With the Wind" is a story in which Scarlett isn't the main event. And, hey, best of luck to anyone who wants to try pulling that off.

Judge Pannell seems less sensible when he says that the "extensive copying" in "The Wind Done Gone" "usurps the original's right to create its own sequel." While this assertion has a narrow legal validity -- there are several commercial reasons for the Mitchell trust to squelch unauthorized "sequels" to "Gone With the Wind" (most notably a contract with St. Martin's Press allowing for the publication of an authorized sequel to be told from the perspective of Rhett Butler) -- no one who loves Mitchell's novel is likely to take any pleasure from Randall's. "Gone With the Wind" is a preposterous, cliché-ridden but highly enjoyable soap opera. "The Wind Done Gone" is a turgid, pretentious, self-consciously "lyrical" attempt at literary fiction. Randall is a songwriter, which may explain why her prose so often degenerates into incoherent blather:

He strides about in black silk and velvet and looks like the ghost of the Confederacy, a sauntering relic haunting the place. Like the evil Godmother at the baby's christening. Why do I write that? I feel like the princess who is cursed at birth. And they try to change the curse, try to move her to safety. Why does R. look like the evil Godmother? Who looks like the prince? Who does R. look like?

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"