Making the Past Accountable: The Wind Done Gone and Stereotypes of Black Women

This chapter introduces my fi rst example of a black cultural product that engages and depicts racist stereotypes: Alice Randall’s novel The Wind Done Gone (2001). Drawing from public interviews, I begin with a discussion of the motivations for Randall’s novel. I consider why Randall rewrote Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind (1936), and why she chose to revolve her novel around two racist stereotypes of black women, the mammy and the jezebel. The black woman’s body and sexuality are at the center of each of these stereotypes, therefore I discuss the ambivalence and agency found within black women’s sexual use of their bodies.