In Paperback: Rhett Butler's People
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by Donald McCaig
St. Martin's Griffin, 2014
Margaret Mitchell's massive, fervidly unreadable 1939 doorstop novel Gone with the Wind has enjoyed a veritable legion of fans since its first appearance, and although Mitchell herself never cashed in on this success by churning out sequels (though she was only four feet tall, she was made of sterner stuff than Tom Clancy), her estate hasn't been quite so picky over the years. Romance author Alexandra Ripley's authorized 1991 sequel, Scarlett, very nearly managed to be as bloated and bleary-eyed as the original, and Alice Randall's unauthorized 2001 pastiche The Wind Done Gone was much more notable for the legal dispute it kicked up than for any actual textual merit - it done stank, in other words, and in this it was little different from most of the nearly 1000 stories under "Gone with the Wind" at Fanfiction.net.
Against such a track record, it was something of a miracle that veteran writer (and lifelong friend to dogs) Donald McCaig was able to make a silk purse of even modest dimensions out of this very sowiest of ears, but his 2007 novel Rhett Butler's People was a meaty, entirely readable affair, presenting readers with a cast of characters - and especially with a Rhett Butler - far more fleshed-out and historically grounded than any of the purple-prosed mannequins in the original novel or its ghastly sequel. The book follows the life of Butler from young boyhood to the events of Gone with the Wind, focusing on the relationships that formed the soiled paragon we meet in Mitchell's pages. The most interesting of these relationships is with former slave Tunis Bonneau, salt-of-the-earth character and a close friend who inadvertently teaches Rhett quite a lot about what it means to be a good person. When McCaig finally gets around to the heart of that relationship, his book takes on a depth and resonance that generally increases as the pages go by.The temptation here - one to which Mitchell herself succumbed with complete abandon - is to treacle, and even so hard-eyed a writer as McCaig can't avoid it in his book's early stages, resulting in frankly awful passages like the one detailing the relationship between Rhett and his sister Rosemary who is - you guessed it - a moppet:
In years to come, little Rosemary wrote her brother faithfully. She told him about her piebald pony, Jack, who had the pleasantest manners. Rosemary rode Jack everywhere. "Mother says I am become a Wild Indian. Have you met any Wild Indians?"When I ask him to jump," Rosemary wrote, "Jack swivels his head and rolls his eyes and lays his ears flat. I believe Jack is insulted!"When a water moccasin struck Jack, Rosemary wrote how she and Hercules sat up through the night with her dying pony. Though Rosemary's hand was steady, this letter was spotted with tearstains.
But once little Rosemary takes a Federal cannonball to the head (not really - but pastiche fiction is all about wish-fulfillment, right?), the narrative is freed to become at times quite rivetingly complex, especially at the half-way mark, when the darkness of Reconstruction evils envelopes Tunis and lands him in a county jail facing a lynching for somebody else's crime. The situation torments McCaig's Rhett, who approaches the court house after having failed to buy off Tunis's accuser and confronts his friend's well-meaning but implicated jailer:
"Where you been, Captain Butler?" Archie asked."With a whore."Archie's smile shrank. "I don't hold with whores."As the sun dropped behind the courthouse roof, bottles appeared.Archie said, "I b'lieve Sheriff Talbot was hoping the Bluebellies would get here before dark."Rhett asked, "Why wait for dark?""Some things ain't fittin' for women and children to see.""You always were fastidious.""And you always liked to use two-bit words. I guess you figured they'd make me mad. Captain, you can't make me mad. No way in hell you can make me mad. You saved my life, and maybe my life ain't worth much, but you're the only one who ever saved it.""What if I told you that boy didn't do anything?"Archie was genuinely puzzled. "He's a nigger, ain't he?"
Inside the jail, Rhett's best friend isn't panicking; he has a request to make of Rhett (he knows that our hero is always armed, and he has no desire to be lynched), but before that, he simply shares some memories:
Tunis smiled. "Ain't it funny what a man thinks about? I'm scared, so dam - darned scared. And all I can think about is happy times. I'm remembering first time I laid eyes on Ruthie. It was a Baptist picnic and I bought Ruthie's cake. It was an apple cake. I remember how I felt when little Nat was born and how it was that last time we run the Charleston blockade. I never said, Rhett, how you was: Captain Rhett Butler standin' on his wheel housing and all the Federal shots and shells on this earth couldn't make him step down."
"The men who became beasts that night at the Clayton County courthouse had been soldiers who killed and had friends killed at their sides," McCaig writes. "Death was no stranger ... Though some in that mob were crazy or simple or drunk, others were respectable men acting from what they saw as duty." This is a very tricky line of historical accountability to walk, and, especially as the book picks up momentum, McCaig does a skillful job of it. If Margaret Mitchell had been able to tolerate stern editing (and had been, you know, sane), she might have written a Gone with the Wind that read very much like what McCaig achieves here.
St. Martin's Griffin is reprinting Rhett Butler's People in a plump, flexible trade paperback in order to herald McCaig's next commission from the Mitchell estate, his long-gestating novel Ruth's Journey (the life story of the polarizing character Mammy), which is scheduled to appear in October. It's a wise strategy; it's been almost a decade since Rhett Butler's People appeared, and this new paperback gives it a chance to find new readers (or make converts of some old ones). Amazingly, it deserves them.