"Soft White Cotton and Blood":Frederick Douglass, Mary Chesnut, and Fertility Tropes in the Reconstruction Diary of The Wind Done Gone Christina K. Adkins Alice Randall wrote her 2001 novel The Wind Done Gone (WDG) as an "antidote" to what she considered the "poison" of Gone with the Wind (Interview with Ken Paulson), Margaret Mitchell's 1936 bestseller, which Randall first read around age twelve and found "shocking" for its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and its depiction of slaves and freedpeople as foolish, incompetent, and unintelligent (Interview with Terry Gross). Randall's rebuttal took the form of a fictional Reconstruction era diary authored by the freedwoman Cynara, the half-sister of Randall's counterpart to Scarlett O'Hara. Critical assessments of Randall's novel have focused primarily on the unsuccessful copyright lawsuit brought by the Stephens Mitchell Trusts and the pivotal question in that case—whether The Wind Done Gone truly constitutes parody, as Randall claimed.1 Her contention is best understood in the context of the theory of signification, which Henry Louis Gates, Jr., defines as repeating in order to revise elements of other texts—a strategy that, historically, has been central to the creation of African American art.2 But a more extensive use of signification has [End Page 1] largely gone unnoticed.3 Although conceived as a refutation of Gone with the Wind, Randall's novel engages with, among other texts, the works of Frederick Douglass and Mary Boykin Chesnut ("Conversation"). The invocation of these authors, especially in relation to fertility themes, is an important, if unrecognized, element of Randall's response to an insidious portrayal of Black people, slavery, and the Reconstruction era. Gone with the Wind advanced slavery and Reconstruction narratives with an implicit message that Black people were incapable of participating in democracy. Reading Mitchell's novel informed an adolescent Randall "that there were people who had a sustained view that Black people were intellectually inferior" (Interview with Terry Gross). That aspect of Gone with the Wind, which Randall deemed most injurious (Interview with Ken Paulson), went hand in hand with its representation of slavery as a harmless, paternal institution and the postwar enfranchisement of African Americans as a period of oppression for the white South. Randall's use of signification to refute Mitchell's assertions placed her novel in conversation not only with Gone with the Wind, but also with the narratives of Douglass and Chesnut. In The Signifying Monkey, a work Randall identified as a theoretical companion to her novel (Randall and Olshan), Gates explains, "all texts Signify upon other texts" (xxiv), either with an intent to criticize, as was Randall's aim in repeating elements of Gone with the Wind, or without intended criticism; the first form is analogous to parody, while the second resembles pastiche (xxiv–xxv, xxvii). According to Gates, "Writers Signify upon each other's texts by rewriting the received textual tradition. This can be accomplished by the revision of tropes," a strategy that "serves, if successful, to create a space for the revising text." "The revising text," in this case Randall's, "is written in the language of the tradition, employing its tropes, its rhetorical strategies, and its ostensible subject matter" (124). As Randall repeated and revised other texts that refuted Mitchell's, she created a space for her protagonist Cynara as a critical rejoinder to Gone with the Wind within the larger scope of American letters. [End Page 2] Randall positioned her protagonist alongside two nineteenth-century intellectuals known for works of life writing that involved substantial revision—Douglass for the three autobiographical texts he authored as his sense of selfhood evolved over the course of his public life, Chesnut for the unsentimental narrative of slavery and Confederate defeat she created by rewriting and editing her Civil War journals. Early in her diary, Cynara identifies Douglass as her literary role model. She equates her text with those of the era's most famous Black author, orator, and activist, who appears briefly as a character in the novel and whose life and work, like Cynara's, are every bit a rebuke of Mitchell's depictions. Cynara's journal...