Law, Parody, and the Politics of African American Literary History GENE ANDREW JARRETT In early 2001, the Stephens Mitchell Trust (hereafter "the trust") learned that Hough- ton Miffiin was planning to publish a parody of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel. Gone with the Wind. A historical romance that opens in 1861, the novel recounts the life and loves of a sensational Southern belle named Scarlett O'Hara before, during, and shortly after the Civil War. Houghton Mifflin's parody. The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, overlaps this historical period and tells the story of Gone with the Wind in the dialect and from the perspective of Cynara, a black woman who alleges two remarkable things: first, she is the half-sister of Scarlett, the result of an adulterous relationship between Scarlett's father and the mammy; second, Scarlett herself is partially black, the descendant of a great-great-grandmother who was a "Négresse" in Haiti. Needless to say. The Wind Done Gone mortified the trust, which not only owns the copyright to Mitchell's bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel but also authorizes the creation and marketing of the novel's derivatives (which have included a 1939 film adaptation, a 1976 television series, a couple of literary sequels in the past two decades, and memorabilia). Since it did not authorize the publication of The Wind Done Gone, the trust hired a legal firm to send a letter to Houghton Miffiin threatening court action. The trust believed that if Houghton Miffiin promoted and published The Wind Done Gone, the publisher would be illegally infringing on the copyright of Gone with the Wind. Houghton Miffiin ignored the trust's demands and proceeded with its plans for the novel. In response, SunTrust Bank (which, as the plaintiff, represented the trust) filed a com- plaint in March 2001 against Houghton Miffiin in the District Court for northern Georgia, urging the court to enjoin the release of The Wind Done Gone and punish the publisher with a payment of $10 million to the trust. The following month, Houghton Miffiin (as the defendant) filed its opposition to SunTrust Bank's com- plaint and lawsuit. In what would become SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Company, the defense focused on the political value of The Wind Done Gone's parody of Gone with the Wind. To make a long story short, the publisher characterized the novel's significance in this way in order to show that the so-called fair use doctrine in US copyright law protects from copyright infringement any literature that communicates free, political speech. Although SunTrust Bank won the case in District Court, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated this result, declaring that the district judge, Charles A. Pannell Jr., had abused his discretion when he prioritized copy- right protection over free speech. When the Circuit Court remanded the case to the District Court with specific instructions, SunTrust Bank and Houghton Mif- fiin settled out of court, and The Wind Done Gone went on sale in stores. Houghton Miffiin's description of The Wind Done Gone as a political parody, and therefore Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:3 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2009-039 © 2009 by Novel, Inc.