Atria books has announced that they will release a prequel to "Gone With the Wind" that will focus on the life of Mammy. The book, titled "Ruth's Journey," was written by 73-year-old Donald McCraig and will be released in October.
According to the New York Times:
The completed book, “Ruth’s Journey,” is the fictional telling of the life of one of the novel’s central characters, a house servant called Mammy who otherwise remains nameless. The story begins in 1804, when Ruth is brought from her birthplace, the French colony of Saint-Domingue that is now known as Haiti, to Savannah, Ga. The Mitchell estate has authorized the prequel, which was written by Donald McCaig, the author of one of two authorized “Gone With the Wind” sequels, “Rhett Butler’s People,” from 2007. (The other was “Scarlett” by Alexandra Ripley, released in 1991.) “Gone With the Wind” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1937 and has sold hundreds of millions of copies.
This will not end well.
The first two-thirds of the 416-page “Ruth’s Journey” are in the third person, and the last portion is told in Ruth’s own dialect.Atria will print 250,000 hardcover copies which is a sign that they expect the book to be a huge success, and they could be right. "Ruth's Journey" might satisfy the craving many audiences have for the depiction of the Happy Slave as Melissa Harris-Perry noted in Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
.Kimberly Foster is the founder and editor of For Harriet. Email or Follow @KimberlyNFoster
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