Verbal Grenades Ignite Discussion About a New Book
March 16, 2004 By JULIE SALAMON
Alice Randall knows how to drill into a nerve.
"Why is it that so many black women are troubled by
interracial relationships?" she asked the women from the
Brooklyn chapter of Links, a service organization made up
mostly of African-American women. "And why is it that so
many black athletes will only choose white women?"
Then she got personal. "My ex-husband, when he remarried,
he married someone white," she said. "What does that say to
my daughter about the attractiveness of black girls?"
With that, she detonated the kind of lively discussion she
was looking for. Nodding, a woman said, "Look at who our
men marry, while our attractive professional women ——"
"Dateless!" another woman interjected.
"That's it," said
another. "Dateless."
This friendly man bashing might seem like an Oprah bonding
session, but Ms. Randall had another purpose, drawing the
audience into the audacious agenda of her
soon-to-be-published novel, "Pushkin and the Queen of
Spades." Ms. Randall, 44, was catapulted into public
consciousness three years ago when she made her literary
debut with an assault on an American sacred cow, "Gone With
the Wind," by telling the tale from the slave's point of
view. Margaret Mitchell's estate tried unsuccessfully to
squelch Ms. Randall's parody, "The Wind Done Gone," giving
the unknown writer the panache of persecution.
The new novel tells the story of a Harvard-educated
professor of Russian literature, a black intellectual snob,
whose son has gone lowbrow by becoming a professional
football player. Worse, he is engaged to a young white
Russian émigré, a lap dancer. In this restless, brainy,
heartfelt, and sometimes maddeningly elliptical work, Ms.
Randall aims to leave no stereotype unchallenged as she
confronts black pride and black ambivalence and strikes
unusual connections between high and low culture, distress
and hopefulness, while dealing with the plainest but most
confounding questions of motherhood.
At the Links meeting, 18 women and 2 men - mostly
middle-aged or older, many coming directly from church on a
Sunday afternoon - seemed charmed by Ms. Randall's ability
to jump from sweeping sociological and historical
pronouncements to a down-to-earth discussion of everyday
matters. They noticed a resemblance between the author and
Windsor, the mother in her book. "She comes from Harvard,
and then she can get ghetto real fast," said one of the
women.
Ms. Randall brings a vigorous world view that confronts
conventional wisdom, whether uttered with highbrow
pretension or street savvy. Windsor names her son Pushkin
X, after Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet
(great-grandson of an African slave) and Malcolm X. This
shrewdly echoes the historical black gambit of creating
identity through fancy names. (Pushkin's own
great-grandfather enriched his own surname with Hannibal.)
Ms. Randall is also tapping into the pride the
African-American intelligentsia has taken from twinned
pieces of Pushkinography, namely, the writer's blackness
and his significance in the white man's canon. "This is the
man who invented the language of Chekhov, of Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky," Ms. Randall told the gathering. "I'm trying
to draw an arc from Afro-Russia all the way to Tupac." In
one chapter Ms. Randall reworks Pushkin's unfinished story
about his great-grandfather, "The Negro of Peter the
Great," as kind of an epic rap poem. (It begins: "Pushkin's
mama's daddy's daddy/Was the dark Abraham/Was the brilliant
stolen man.")
On the way to Medgar Evers College for the Links meeting,
Ms. Randall explained why she had flown in from her home in
Nashville to introduce her book in an outer borough to
community stalwarts, including teachers and social workers,
rather than the usual buzzmeisters.
"I'm here to hear criticism, to pay my respect," she said.
"This is my real audience. I'm here to get real feedback
from the people I care about most."
It is smart marketing, too. With "The Wind Done Gone," the
academic establishment got behind the First Amendment
issues and won the day, but critics were mixed on Ms.
Randall's book. (In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
called it "clumsy, self-important and sometimes laughably
silly.") The book touched a chord among readers, however,
and became a best seller.
Tapping into those book buyers again - without the press
and sympathy that comes with controversy and suppression -
is the task now facing Ms. Randall and her publisher,
Houghton Mifflin. Hence the face-to-face with friendly
readers who can help spread the word. They were provided
with advance copies by the publisher.
Ms. Randall avoids being pigeon-holed. For the Links she
wore an understated black suit, but also a pair of shiny,
pointy Dolce & Gabbana shoes (for which she paid $140, 75
percent off the original price, she noted). Seeing the
audience was small, she ignored the podium and started
dragging tables together to form a circle.
Within minutes she discovered a connection, one woman had
attended Fisk University in Nashville with Ms. Randall's
mother-in-law. She cheerfully abandoned the Atkins diet to
partake of the inviting carrot cake prepared by one of the
participants.
Like Windsor, the character Ms. Randall insists she is not,
the writer grew up in Detroit (daughter of a dry cleaner),
was acquainted with men of little formal education who were
numbers geniuses, attended private school in Washington and
then Harvard, and had a difficult relationship with her
mother. Although she alluded in conversation to painful
childhood memories, she did not invoke them in public or
discuss them in private. She will only go so far to promote
her book. "I don't want to discuss my back story to sell
books," she said firmly. "I refuse to help anyone be
defined by victimization."
Her peripatetic intellect led her, a year out of college,
to Nashville to become a country song writer. It was a
reaction, she said, to writing a feminist critique of Jane
Austen's work for her thesis.
"I figured the country western audience was the most
distant from my sensibility, where I would have to write in
the most general powerful language," she said. "It was the
opposite of intellectual esoterica."
In both her fictive and real life narratives, Ms. Randall
doesn't mind an abrupt transition. "I didn't want my text
to be beautiful, to be linear and narrow," she said. "To
say I have to follow a traditional novelistic structure is
like saying I have to straighten my hair."
Back to Nashville. With a grin, she said, "I am, as far as
I know, the only black woman in history to write a No. 1
country song." The song, "XXX's and OOO's (An American
Girl)," written with Matraca Berg and recorded by Trisha
Yearwood, manages to mention Aretha Franklin and Patsy
Cline in the same line.
Even in this world not traveled much by African-Americans,
she found places to stake out territory not just for
herself but for an entire race. She learned Hank Williams
was influenced by a black street musician named Rufus Payne
and called Teetot. She wrote a bluegrass song, "The Ballad
of Sally Ann," about a man who was lynched between his
wedding and his reception.
Songwriting occupied her 20's. In her 30's she tried her
hand at movie and television scripts, selling a few that
didn't get made, earning a substantial income but feeling
frustrated. Then, having remarried and approaching 40, she
realized her daughter was turning 11, about Ms. Randall's
age when she read "Gone With the Wind."
Thus the next phase. "I was offended that this book had
taken slavery and turned it into an entertainment," she
said. "I did not want that book to sit on the shelf
unrebuked and unscorned. I wanted to make an assault on
that text for my daughter."
That accomplished, she turned to Pushkin. "I wrote about
`Gone With the Wind' because it had injured me," she told
the Links women. "With this book I wanted to write about
something that empowered me. That was finding out when I
was 13 years old that the man who invented the modern
Russian language was the great-grandson of a slave."
One of the women murmured, "Her insights are wonderful."
Mission accomplished.
For the record Ms. Randall has also received feedback from
the people her publisher might care most about: the
industry. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly declared:
"With this heady tale, Randall proves decisively that she
is more than a parodist. Forecast: An 11-city tour and
heavy promotion (this is Houghton Mifflin's lead spring
title) should help persuade readers that "The Wind Done
Gone" was more than a flash in the pan." The book is
scheduled for publication on May 4, Ms. Randall's 45th
birthday.
Alice Randall knows how to drill into a nerve.
"Why is it that so many black women are troubled by
interracial relationships?" she asked the women from the
Brooklyn chapter of Links, a service organization made up
mostly of African-American women. "And why is it that so
many black athletes will only choose white women?"
Then she got personal. "My ex-husband, when he remarried,
he married someone white," she said. "What does that say to
my daughter about the attractiveness of black girls?"
With that, she detonated the kind of lively discussion she
was looking for. Nodding, a woman said, "Look at who our
men marry, while our attractive professional women ——"
"Dateless!" another woman interjected.
"That's it," said
another. "Dateless."
This friendly man bashing might seem like an Oprah bonding
session, but Ms. Randall had another purpose, drawing the
audience into the audacious agenda of her
soon-to-be-published novel, "Pushkin and the Queen of
Spades." Ms. Randall, 44, was catapulted into public
consciousness three years ago when she made her literary
debut with an assault on an American sacred cow, "Gone With
the Wind," by telling the tale from the slave's point of
view. Margaret Mitchell's estate tried unsuccessfully to
squelch Ms. Randall's parody, "The Wind Done Gone," giving
the unknown writer the panache of persecution.
The new novel tells the story of a Harvard-educated
professor of Russian literature, a black intellectual snob,
whose son has gone lowbrow by becoming a professional
football player. Worse, he is engaged to a young white
Russian émigré, a lap dancer. In this restless, brainy,
heartfelt, and sometimes maddeningly elliptical work, Ms.
Randall aims to leave no stereotype unchallenged as she
confronts black pride and black ambivalence and strikes
unusual connections between high and low culture, distress
and hopefulness, while dealing with the plainest but most
confounding questions of motherhood.
At the Links meeting, 18 women and 2 men - mostly
middle-aged or older, many coming directly from church on a
Sunday afternoon - seemed charmed by Ms. Randall's ability
to jump from sweeping sociological and historical
pronouncements to a down-to-earth discussion of everyday
matters. They noticed a resemblance between the author and
Windsor, the mother in her book. "She comes from Harvard,
and then she can get ghetto real fast," said one of the
women.
Ms. Randall brings a vigorous world view that confronts
conventional wisdom, whether uttered with highbrow
pretension or street savvy. Windsor names her son Pushkin
X, after Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet
(great-grandson of an African slave) and Malcolm X. This
shrewdly echoes the historical black gambit of creating
identity through fancy names. (Pushkin's own
great-grandfather enriched his own surname with Hannibal.)
Ms. Randall is also tapping into the pride the
African-American intelligentsia has taken from twinned
pieces of Pushkinography, namely, the writer's blackness
and his significance in the white man's canon. "This is the
man who invented the language of Chekhov, of Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky," Ms. Randall told the gathering. "I'm trying
to draw an arc from Afro-Russia all the way to Tupac." In
one chapter Ms. Randall reworks Pushkin's unfinished story
about his great-grandfather, "The Negro of Peter the
Great," as kind of an epic rap poem. (It begins: "Pushkin's
mama's daddy's daddy/Was the dark Abraham/Was the brilliant
stolen man.")
On the way to Medgar Evers College for the Links meeting,
Ms. Randall explained why she had flown in from her home in
Nashville to introduce her book in an outer borough to
community stalwarts, including teachers and social workers,
rather than the usual buzzmeisters.
"I'm here to hear criticism, to pay my respect," she said.
"This is my real audience. I'm here to get real feedback
from the people I care about most."
It is smart marketing, too. With "The Wind Done Gone," the
academic establishment got behind the First Amendment
issues and won the day, but critics were mixed on Ms.
Randall's book. (In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
called it "clumsy, self-important and sometimes laughably
silly.") The book touched a chord among readers, however,
and became a best seller.
Tapping into those book buyers again - without the press
and sympathy that comes with controversy and suppression -
is the task now facing Ms. Randall and her publisher,
Houghton Mifflin. Hence the face-to-face with friendly
readers who can help spread the word. They were provided
with advance copies by the publisher.
Ms. Randall avoids being pigeon-holed. For the Links she
wore an understated black suit, but also a pair of shiny,
pointy Dolce & Gabbana shoes (for which she paid $140, 75
percent off the original price, she noted). Seeing the
audience was small, she ignored the podium and started
dragging tables together to form a circle.
Within minutes she discovered a connection, one woman had
attended Fisk University in Nashville with Ms. Randall's
mother-in-law. She cheerfully abandoned the Atkins diet to
partake of the inviting carrot cake prepared by one of the
participants.
Like Windsor, the character Ms. Randall insists she is not,
the writer grew up in Detroit (daughter of a dry cleaner),
was acquainted with men of little formal education who were
numbers geniuses, attended private school in Washington and
then Harvard, and had a difficult relationship with her
mother. Although she alluded in conversation to painful
childhood memories, she did not invoke them in public or
discuss them in private. She will only go so far to promote
her book. "I don't want to discuss my back story to sell
books," she said firmly. "I refuse to help anyone be
defined by victimization."
Her peripatetic intellect led her, a year out of college,
to Nashville to become a country song writer. It was a
reaction, she said, to writing a feminist critique of Jane
Austen's work for her thesis.
"I figured the country western audience was the most
distant from my sensibility, where I would have to write in
the most general powerful language," she said. "It was the
opposite of intellectual esoterica."
In both her fictive and real life narratives, Ms. Randall
doesn't mind an abrupt transition. "I didn't want my text
to be beautiful, to be linear and narrow," she said. "To
say I have to follow a traditional novelistic structure is
like saying I have to straighten my hair."
Back to Nashville. With a grin, she said, "I am, as far as
I know, the only black woman in history to write a No. 1
country song." The song, "XXX's and OOO's (An American
Girl)," written with Matraca Berg and recorded by Trisha
Yearwood, manages to mention Aretha Franklin and Patsy
Cline in the same line.
Even in this world not traveled much by African-Americans,
she found places to stake out territory not just for
herself but for an entire race. She learned Hank Williams
was influenced by a black street musician named Rufus Payne
and called Teetot. She wrote a bluegrass song, "The Ballad
of Sally Ann," about a man who was lynched between his
wedding and his reception.
Songwriting occupied her 20's. In her 30's she tried her
hand at movie and television scripts, selling a few that
didn't get made, earning a substantial income but feeling
frustrated. Then, having remarried and approaching 40, she
realized her daughter was turning 11, about Ms. Randall's
age when she read "Gone With the Wind."
Thus the next phase. "I was offended that this book had
taken slavery and turned it into an entertainment," she
said. "I did not want that book to sit on the shelf
unrebuked and unscorned. I wanted to make an assault on
that text for my daughter."
That accomplished, she turned to Pushkin. "I wrote about
`Gone With the Wind' because it had injured me," she told
the Links women. "With this book I wanted to write about
something that empowered me. That was finding out when I
was 13 years old that the man who invented the modern
Russian language was the great-grandson of a slave."
One of the women murmured, "Her insights are wonderful."
Mission accomplished.
For the record Ms. Randall has also received feedback from
the people her publisher might care most about: the
industry. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly declared:
"With this heady tale, Randall proves decisively that she
is more than a parodist. Forecast: An 11-city tour and
heavy promotion (this is Houghton Mifflin's lead spring
title) should help persuade readers that "The Wind Done
Gone" was more than a flash in the pan." The book is
scheduled for publication on May 4, Ms. Randall's 45th
birthday.
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