Mammy's story: Donald McCaig writes another prequel to 'Gone With the Wind'

photo Hattie McDaniel, right, as Mammy and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind."
photo Hattie McDaniel, left, was given the Motion Picture Academy award for the best performance of an actress in a supporting role in 1939 for her work as "Mammy" in the film version of "Gone With the Wind" on Feb. 29, 1940 in Los Angeles, Calif. The presentation of the award was given by actress Fay Bainter, right. (AP Photo)
photo Hattie McDaniel, the actress who won an Oscar in 1940 for portraying Mammy in the film version of "Gone With the Wind," was given an honorary postage stamp in 2006. (AP Photo/USPS)
photo Donald McCaig

How do you build a backstory for, much less give a name to, one of the greatest supporting characters in American literature?

For Donald McCaig, it started while writing a church skit about biblical heroine Ruth. Similarities between the lives of the Old Testament character and Mammy, the no-nonsense female played by Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel in the film version of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," caught his attention. He saw the same virtues of faithfulness, caregiving and loyalty to family between the two women.

"I thought, 'There's a story that really wants to be told,'" he recalls.

That a-ha moment inspired the author's 10th novel, "Ruth's Journey" (Simon and Schuster, $26), a prequel to "Gone with the Wind" authorized by the Margaret Mitchell Estate.

"We know Mammy grew up with a French family," McCaig told his audience at a recent book signing at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta. "She was Ellen O'Hara's mammy and then Scarlett's. Margaret Mitchell doesn't tell us who she was. There's no mention of did she ever fall in love or have a child -- most people do in their lives."

Mammy is introduced to readers as an orphaned child during the turbulent, late 18th-century revolution in French colony Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). She is taken in by Capt. Augustin Fornier and his wife, Solange, for whom she serves as both companion and slave. Solange, maternal grandmother of GWTW heroine Scarlett O'Hara, names the child Ruth and tutors her in deportment as well as running a household and child care. When the Forniers escape Haiti, taking Ruth along with them, the trio begin life in America as refugees in Savannah.

This is not McCaig's first spinoff of a character from "Gone With the Wind." He was chosen by the Mitchell Estate to write "Rhett Butler's People," released in 2007, which told the legendary Scarlett-Rhett love story from Butler's point of view -- although McCaig had never seen the movie nor read Alexandra Ripley's sequel, "Scarlett."

This time, he says, he approached the Mitchell Estate with his vision for Mammy's life story. The author chuckles as he recalls that the estate's lawyers were not immediately on board with the plan.

"It literally came out of left field and we were surprised," says Atlanta attorney Paul Anderson Jr., business consultant for the Mitchell Estate.

"What was important in our minds at the time was: Could this be done delicately? Obviously with race relations what they were in the 1930s and what they are now, it's a sensitive topic," Anderson says. "The estate committee as it was then, of which my father and I were two of the three members, has always been very careful to maintain the dignity and reputation of Margaret Mitchell and 'Gone With the Wind.'"

GETTING ONBOARD

The Mitchell Estate also hadn't planned to release another related novel so soon after "Rhett Butler's People," Anderson says, but McCaig had successfully kept the integrity of GWTW in the Butler sequel, so the Mitchell Estate had full trust in him.

"We knew he had no intention of doing anything that would have been politically incorrect," Anderson says.

"Donald was enthusiastic about it, his agent and our agent were extremely high on it, then we ran it by Simon and Schuster and they were enthusiastic. Our concern about the reception a book about Mammy would get was alleviated a good bit by the enthusiasm of everyone who was told about the idea," he adds.

Anderson says there were no restrictions or parameters set for McCaig.

"It's remarkable to me how a 74-year-old, white, Southern gentleman can get into the mind of a black female slave 150 years later. That's just what artists do. I think he's done a phenomenal job," says Anderson.

John Wiley, a noted GWTW authority who has amassed one of the world's largest collections of GWTW and Mitchell memorabilia, calls McCaig's novel "the best of 'Gone With the Wind' derivatives."

"Mammy is probably the third-most-important character in 'Gone With the Wind,' next to Scarlett and Rhett, but the one about which we know the least," says Wiley, who also publishes the "The Scarlett Letter," a quarterly newsletter for GWTW fans and collectors. "I think he has created a backstory that is plausible and explains why Mammy Ruth was so loyal to both the Robillard and O'Hara families."

McCaig says the latest book took him three years to complete, although he found it easier to write than "Rhett Butler's People" because he wasn't as confined by Mitchell's description of Mammy as he had been with Rhett.

"When you write a book around an American masterpiece, you have to respect their characters to do an honest job," he explains.

But he says Mammy's prequel will be his last foray to Tara.

"One of the unusual things about 'Gone With the Wind' is that Mitchell has a lot of characters who are incredible. Those characters are so well-fleshed-out that you can go anywhere with them. But, I think, once you have Rhett and Mammy down, you are done with it."

LIVING HISTORY

As McCaig's fans know, he is a stickler for historical accuracy in his fiction. Throughout "Ruth's Journey," he entwines Mammy's loves and losses with historic events of that era. For example, Ruth marries a free black woodworker, who becomes involved with conspirators in the Savannah slave rebellion of 1822.

To understand life in Haiti, whose culture, food and sights Ruth would have known as a child, McCaig says he flew to Haiti to begin his research. To understand Ruth's life as a young black woman and new mammy in Savannah, he spent time in that coastal city, walking the squares and researching antebellum life.

"In Haiti, I saw poverty and labor that made me shudder. But one thing Haitians didn't lack was hope. I thought Ruth as a young child would have hoped a French family might adopt her," McCaig says. "In Savannah, it was easy to imagine mammies walking their children each morning, and when Ruth got old enough to take on some of those child-care duties, she would have learned from them."

The first two-thirds of "Ruth's Journey" are told in third person, the remainder in Mammy's first-person voice.

"In the last third of the book, I wanted Mammy to talk and tell her story," McCaig says. "I'd written the first two sections and I wondered if she would talk to me. I knew if she didn't, I was done and the book was done.

"But I sat down, and when Mammy started speaking, I just wrote. I lot of what you do as a writer is become lost in (the character's) world. Electrical bills and problems of this world just dissolve."

Contact Susan Pierce at spierce@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6284.

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