'Ruth's Journey': No 'Gone With the Wind'

The word "mammy" comes freighted with the legacy of America's shameful racial past.

Now a cultural stereotype and term of derision, "mammy" has come to represent the stout, stoic slave woman forced to deny herself to serve the needs of her masters and mistresses. In Ruth's Journey, the Mammy of Gone with the Wind fame gets a name and a back story. But as with the real mammys, her life and story take a backseat to the children she raises and the families she serves.

Orphaned when her family is massacred during the slave uprising on what is now Haiti, Ruth is taken in by a French captain and his ambitious and aristocratic wife Solange. Even as a child, the charming Ruth is unusually perceptive about people and their motives. She also has the gift, or curse, of "seeing things."

From Haiti to Savannah, Charleston and finally, the plantation known as Tara, Ruth is a formidable, take-charge woman who raises — among others — the captivatingly headstrong Scarlett O'Hara, heroine of Margaret Mitchell's Civil War classic Gone With the Wind and one of the most beloved characters in literary history.

Ruth's Journey is author Donald McCaig's second commission from Mitchell's estate to spin off a character from GWTW. The acclaimed Civil War novelist of Canaan and Jacob's Ladder also told the back story of Scarlett's irresistible rogue of a husband in Rhett Butler's People.

But Solange Fornier is no Scarlett O'Hara, and other than Ruth, none of the characters in Ruth's Journey is as memorable or compelling as Gone With the Wind's Ashley, Melanie or even the Tarleton twins.

McCaig uses themes familiar to fans of GWTW: as with Tara, Scarlett's beloved home, Solange's Pink House comes to represent a family's aspirations; horses bring tragic deaths; and slave owners show unrelenting cruelty.

Mammy's life is one of repressed dreams and desires, but little fury at the tragedies that befall her. So formidable is she, when a drunken master paws her, she beans him with a decanter and demands he sell her to someone else. And he does. Really?

It makes you wonder what Ruth's journey might have been had a provocative woman of color written it.

Ruth's Journey

By Donald McCaig

Atria

2.5 stars