‘Gone With the Wind’ prequel with ‘Mammy’ at its heart hits bookstores
AUTHOR APPEARANCE
Donald McCaig will discuss "Ruth's Journey" at 7 p.m. Oct. 17. $10. The Literary Center at the Margaret Mitchell House, 990 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-249-7015, www.atlantahistorycenter.com.
"Gone With the Wind"?
Hardly.
With the possible exception of Coca-Cola, Margaret Mitchell’s fictional creation is Atlanta’s most sustainable brand. The book that the onetime Atlanta Journal reporter churned out in an apartment house on the corner of 10th and Peachtree streets sold 176,000 copies when it was first published in 1936. By 1939, it had passed 2 million in sales; even now, it’s the indefatigable Scarlett O’Hara of books, reliably selling some 75,000 copies every year.
And now comes another authorized sequel, the second by acclaimed Civil War novelist Donald McCaig (“Rhett Butler’s People” came out in 2007). Actually, “Ruth’s Journey” (Atria Books, $26), which arrives in bookstores Tuesday, is mostly a prequel. And, McCaig suggests, a much-needed fleshing out of one of the original book’s “three major characters” — the O’Hara clan’s indispensable, tough love-dispensing “Mammy.”
“Scarlett and Rhett are familiars, but when it comes to the third, we don’t know where she was born, if she was ever married, if she ever had children,” McCaig told The New York Times last spring about the novel, which opens in circa-1800 Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and ends almost where Mitchell began her story, at a barbecue at Twelve Oaks in 1861. “Indeed, we don’t even know her name.”
Much of Ruth’s backstory is McCaig’s creation. But familiar characters and events from “Gone With the Wind” show up in ways that help explain her gradual progression toward her life at Tara. Once she gets there, the book almost feels less interesting, perhaps because we already know Mitchell’s version of this story so well.
Before that, though, “Ruth’s Journey” has plenty to hold a reader’s attention. With McCaig, 73, appearing Oct. 17 at the Literary Center at the Margaret Mitchell House, here are a half-dozen things that stand out about the new book:
- Now we do know "Mammy's" real name. (Or do we?) The book begins during the slave revolt that ultimately overthrew Saint-Domingue's French colonial rulers. A young black girl who survived her family's slaughter is discovered by a French officer and brought home to his wife, who names the Creole- and French-speaking child "Ruth" on the spot. Years later, when someone calls her "Mrs. Glen" on her wedding day, she confides, "I been Ruth long time. Don't remember who I been afore."
- Ruth wasn't just married. She was a mother herself. Long before she ever laid eyes on the O'Haras, Ruth had her own family in Charleston, S.C. How that happened — and, spoiler alert, how it all came horribly undone — is the most riveting part of the book and ultimately leads her to her life at Tara.
- Scarlett O'Hara has nothing on her maternal grandma. Maybe McCaig simply couldn't resist creating his own version of "Gone With the Wind's" lively heroine; more likely he wanted to show how the beautiful, multi-married, always scheming apple didn't fall far from the family tree. Whatever the reason, Solange Escarlette Fornier Evans Robillard (her first husband was the one who found little Ruth on Saint-Domingue) is one of the book's most colorful characters and a true survivor — that is, until she dies following the birth of Ellen, her child by her third husband and the future mother of Scarlett O'Hara.
- And Atlanta has nothing on Savannah. A major player in "Gone With the Wind," Atlanta barely figures in "Ruth's Journey." Instead, Savannah is where Solange et al. land in the U.S. when her scheming gets them onto a ship steaming out of strife-torn Saint-Domingue; and, other than a few years in Charleston, Savannah is where Ruth resides up until the time that Ellen marries Gerald O'Hara and brings her lifelong "Mammy" along to their new home in the "Up-country." That place, Tara, definitely needs work. Meanwhile, McCaig's Savannah is an exciting place where a duel is fought and a showy new home is built boasting — gasp! — a toilet.
- Rhett Butler and Ruth have history. And it doesn't involve Scarlett O'Hara. When Scarlett sets her cap for Rhett in "Gone With the Wind," Mammy dismisses the well-known rake, gambler and blockade runner as "trash" and a "rapscallion." She's even more upset when he shows up fairly late in "Ruth's Journey," but McCaig comes up with a new and deeper reason why. It goes back many years to Ruth's time in Charleston, when Rhett's father did something that tragically altered her life.
- Ruth gets the last word. After 250 pages of third-person narration, the final portion of the book is told in Ruth's own voice. It mostly takes place at Tara in the days leading up to the Civil War — a time and setting that some feel Mitchell overly romanticized in "Gone With the Wind." The final sentence might not have the same ring as "Tomorrow is another day," but it does go to the woman formerly known only as Mammy.
