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TEAPOT 4/26/2014 8:50:51 AM
I was not yet twenty when I sold my first short story (to SEVENTEEN Magazine), and that was about the time I began communing with dead authors. I did not know any living ones, and I did not know how to approach them, anyway.
I started having dialogues with Mark Twain, Henry James, Fedor Dostoevski, the Brontes, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and a few others I thought were dead, but who did not respond because, unbeknownst to me, they were very much alive and kicking.
How I accomplished this is a secret I cannot share without appearing to be a transonic bore; suffice it to say it involved pages of their books saturated with a chthonic poultice that rendered that edition forever unreadable, the scattering about of many lighted and malodorous candles, wax recordings (78 rpm) of quacking eyases, facial rubbings with nearly spent typewriter ribbons and crinkled carbon paper, and other sundry toys common to the residents of Grubb Street.
In later years, I abandoned all this nonsense and began frequenting a spiritualist – Madam Curie Ozity – an aged physic who worked out of a pied-a-terre, a rather Augean stable, actually, in South Fulton County, somewhat near the Atlanta airport.
She was well over a hundred years old, nearly pilgarlic, with strands of whitish threads squeezing from beneath the edges of a tin tiara; and she had, under a voluminous muumuu, a body whose topography I could only imagine weighing in easily at five hundred fifty pounds.
“Who ya’ wanna talk wit dis time?” she asked, as a leviathan jet taking off from a nearby runway rattled the walls and sent a whiteout of plaster drifting down from the ceiling.
“Margaret Mitchell,” I whispered shyly, aware that I might be suggesting a peccant tryst by simply evoking the name of such a Georgia literary deity. It occurred to me I probably had a better chance with Flannery O’Connor, Lillian Hellman, or Kate Chopin.
Madam Curie Ozity, whose eyes had been closed from the moment I walked in, popped them open. “Y’all wanna yak wit Peggy Mitchell?”
“Margaret, uh, Mitchell,” I said.
“Doan call her Margret; she doan like dat. Maggie no good neither. Call her Peggy. Git tuh know her better, Peg be okay.”
I promised I would comply. “Can you contact her?”
Madam Curie Ozity dropped the lid of one rheumy eye and regarded me through the diaphanous film of the other.
“Gonna cosschew twenny,” she mumbled.
“I got it,” I said.
“Ya’ own book sellin’ dat good?”
“No.”
“How come?”
I shrugged. I told her, “Can’t get a lick of local ink.”
She shrugged back at me. “Bes’ seller’s ain’t made ‘tween the covers,” she said.
“Right. Yeah,” I muttered, indifferently. “I just want to talk with Margaret Mitchell.”
My psychic nodded eupeptically. “Les’s see she home.”
What followed was a rather fugacious incantation straight from an RKO B-movie, circa 1940, that was more comic than orphic, and it culminated in an off-key threnody more grating than chilling.
“What do you want?” came a sweet voice from the shadows.
“Miss Mitchell?” I responded, my voice suddenly timorous and wafer-thin. “That you?”
“Mrs. Mitchell. Of course, it’s me. What brings you to Tara-Tara Land?”
I cleared my throat, adapting the chords to my best radio interviewer timbre, I saw nothing, nor had any hint from whence the voice emanated; in the darkened room, lit only by two citronella candles on the table before us; any hope of seeing even a vaporous apparition was a consummation devoutly (and futilely) to be wished.
“I was wondering if you’d read The Wind Done Gone?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” Mrs. Mitchell replied, without hesitating, and her tone revealed nothing. “Have you?”
“Only bits and pieces in the press, and on the Internet.”
“Oh! Too bad! Try and get a copy of the whole thing. It is a . . . curious piece. Ought to be required reading in every class on pinchbeck writing! It is so bad, it is good. Matter of fact, I am re-reading it right now and trying my best to figure out why this Randall woman bothered. I wish I had known her when I was writing the original; she would have been a major help to me then.
“You know, I believe Scarlet had a mulatto half-sister in my first draft, but Annie Laurie Williams edited her out. That was after the suitcase incident.”
That piqued my attention. I asked,”What was the suitcase incident?”
“Oh, that!” Margaret Mitchell delicately snorted a hearty laugh. She said, “Well, when I took the manuscript to New York, I had it stuffed into a cardboard valise with a defective latch. As I was ushered into Annie Laurie’s office, the darned thing flopped open and all twenty-eight hundred hand-written pages spilled out, all over the floor. You should have seen the two of us on our hands and knees trying to put it all back together! It had never occurred to me to number the pages!”
This made Madam Curie Ozity laugh uproariously. “Man, that musta been a sight fer sore eyes!”
“O, my oh me, it was! I wanted so to make an impression, and it was so embarrassing. But Annie Laurie laughed pretty much as you just did, and we spent the next five hours stacking the pages properly and becoming close friends. Agents and editors were so different back then,” she added, wistfully.
I might have sounded a bit impatient: “Yes, yes. But about The Wind Done Gone — “
“Don’t be so impatient,” Mrs. Mitchell scolded. “I haven’t talked with Madam Curie Ozity in several years, and I never told her about my adventures in New York.”
I hung my head. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I —“
“I know, I know. It’s on everyone’s minds. The Wind Done Gone . . . Well, let me tell you what I think. I think that Randall woman – I can’t remember her first name – has written a silly but jolly good tribute to my book. What is that stuff and nonsense about imitation being the finest flattery?
“Well, that is not even true in this case,” Mitchell continued. “TWDG is not an imitation of GWTW — even the initials have no symmetry. But in some respects, she is really a better writer than I am, er, was. She has tackled a story, a plot, a time, much bigger than appeared in my perspective back in the ‘20s and ‘30s. I think she sees the Civil War and America as only a black woman living in the new millennium can. Posh, were I setting out to write GWTW today, I might approach it from an entirely different point of view myself. . . I don’t know.”
I took an altered tack. “You’re not angry, frustrated,” I said, “by the use of your characters, scenes, your dialogue, plots and sub-plots?”
“Oh, fiddle-dee-dee! I am not going to get into an argy-bargy over that! The South was (and is) full of hundreds of Scarletts and Rhetts and Melanies and Ashleys, and so on. . . They were only hypocorisms anyway!
“I wrote and developed my characters and my story-lines as I saw them, and if someone comes along and thinks it is okay to play word games for the amusement of the Great Unwashed – so what? Copyright infringement? Plagiarism? Lawsy, do you think I did not steal some people and ideas from others? Do you think you never have? Do you think the estate of Mark Twain might not find a few things suspect in his own books? Come on! As Mammy would say, Gimme a break!”
I was somewhat taken aback and fell silent. Madam Curie Ozity broke the spell, so to speak. “Peg, y’all still there?”
“Where else would I be?”
“Wha’ ch’ wanna do ‘bout all dis this ruckus?
“Well, I personally am going to do absolutely nothing. Even if I could, I would not be about to promulgate this folly with an unladylike and unSouthern-like philippic exercise.
“I could not care less if Ms Randall’s book sells a trillion copies and is made into a fabulous movie — not that I think for a moment it ever will.
“Unfortunately, as my dear friend Max Perkins once said — in fact, he said it just recently once again during a Sunday afternoon soirée over at Bill Faulkner’s infernal place — ‘you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’
“Her book will, thanks mainly to unrelenting diatribes by the media, and the eventual exposure of the silver screen, make the lady very, very rich — and very, very miserable.”
“Why do you say that?” I wondered, aloud; “miserable, I mean.”
“Miserable? Because when the hullabaloo over this dies down in about another ten days, what is she going to do next? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Moby Dick? Tale of Two Cities? This Side of Paradise? The Greatest Story Ever Told?”
“What about a blockbuster movie?” I suggested.
“What about it? Can’t you see Madonna playing Other opposite Denzel Washington? Steve Martin as Ashley? Halle Berry as Cynara? Queen Latifah as Miss Prissy? Whoopie Goldberg as Beauty? Chris Rock as Pork? Danny Divito as Planter? Vivica Fox as Mammy? And Bernie Mac at the end, turning back in the doorway, and saying, ‘Say what? Frankly, bitch, I don’t give a shit!’ I only hope writers like you and sensible people in the media can see through all this.
“The Wind Done Gone is a parody of itself,” she said, “as ephemeral as the comic books of the 30s and 40s. GWTW will not only survive, it will endure. Trust me. Originality is the only thing that matters, young man. It is the only thing that lasts. Tomorrow is . . . you know . . . I have to go now.”
“She sumpin’, ain’t she?”
I nodded, taking a twenty-dollar bill out of my shirt pocket. I looked at the sad face and flowing mane of Andy Jackson as I smoothed the bill on the table before me
“She sure is, Madam. Frankly, she sure is — and I do give a damn.”
Madam Curie Ozity reached up somewhere and yanked the chain on the tassel-shaded lamp above the table, erupting the room into an objurgation of fantasy. Reality, in all its fury, returned instantly. The two of us sat alone, looking at each other.
