Sequel to a Dream                    

12,091 wds

Thirty years ago in Richmond, Virginia, as editor of The New Southern Literary Messenger, a literary magazine so obscure i barely remember much of it myself, i received the outline of a sequel to Gone With the Wind. Southern editors received many such propositions in that decade, nostalgia perfecting history. 

I have forgotten the title of the sequel, name of the author and where he or she lived. In those days i received many short stories from a woman in a small town in Georgia. I’m inclined to think she sent the sequel outline. I can’t be sure. For a year or more her stories arrived regularly, neatly typed on EZ-erase onion skin paper. I rejected all of them. I have forgotten along with her name any details from her stories and am left with a vague impression of overgrown, tangled gardens wherein a woman walks alone. Deepening  the mystery, the sequel outline which i liked very much, was not typed on E-Z erase onion skill paper, but what of that, even a southerner cam modernize. Across the abyss of memory i sense a feminine hand and so, for lack of one with a more suitable style, plot or location i have come to think of the author as Georgia.

    Who the true author of this sequel to Gone With the Wind is there is only one way of knowing. 

I read and reread Georgia’s outline and loved it. It seemed the south burned anew, this time with the fires of justice. If this is published, i thought, it would again send the forces of hate into the torch blazing night clad in robes of shame or down into bunkers to dig themselves deeper into corruption. In those days I was eager to smash the mirrors and scatter the smoke of the vacant-eyed, greed driven voodoo economics. I believed a literary magazine with a press run never greater than 500 copies could be a powerful agent of change. I launched a vigorous assault from behind my desk. 

Immediately writing to the sequel author with blazing enthusiasm, i felt i made the discovery every editor dreams of. If she was looking for an advance on her book she knocked on the wrong door but encouragement I had in plenty. 

Looking back on seven years (1981 to 88) as editor of The New Sothern Literary Messenger, today i remember this outline of a sequel to a novel i had not completely read and still haven’t fully absorbed was the most exciting manuscript, published or unpublished, to cross my desk. Many of the particulars are still fresh before my eyes. I studied the outline, checked a few dates and names for accuracy, found most of them sound and returned the manuscript with my enthusiastic response. I filed the cover letter and the copy of my response. Or I didn’t file it, I can’t say. Either way, it was thrown out when I left the editorship and cleaned out what little paper work remained. I rarely kept correspondence very long. I was a paper work minimalist. 

    The plot, characters and mood of the sequel never left me. As they say in North Carolina the author had “put a bug in my ear.” I waited for continuing correspondence from the author or news of the novel complete and published and published it was not. In idle moments and day dreams i began to write my own sequel based on Georgia’s outline. On intemperate evenings of literary pot valor I claimed authorship of it. I added, subtracted, switched people, scenes and dialogue, took notes and wrote two complete chapters, all based on a stranger’s plan. When i read of an historical personage or that someone relevant to the story had died, i attempted to include them, wedge them into a scene and have them speak. I felt i had discovered a significant piece of unwritten literature, a classic at least of our own time. 

All this is labor lost and i knew it and still know it and, like a chemical addiction, was helpless before it. I have always known i have to get rid of it, this constructing an edifice on someone else’s foundation. I covet someone else’s dream and must not continue as a thief. 

       Despite my struggle to forget it, this proposed sequel continued to grow. The ideas sublimated in the outline, ideas perhaps only i noticed, represented for me the best and the worst of the old south, of the pride and determination and changes since then (you know what I mean by ‘then,’ the old immortal and indomitable ‘then’ every southerner is born with and sinks into the psyche of northerners who stay too long) combined gracefully with fresh notions of the New South. This South can only be truly New if there is in it respect and dignity for all. With this in mind and respect for the positive changes (but who interprets ‘positive?’) i would like to sketch out some background and the story itself hopefully for the last time. 

        Georgia never responded to my letter of excessive encouragement and i no longer received short stories typed on E-Z erase onion skin paper. It’s possible my enthusiasm had a reverse effect. Like most people, authors might fear changes made by acceptance as much as rejection. 

This is how extraordinary i thought this sequel would be; instead of rekindling the fires of racism, i thought it would sweep them away. Instead of enraging the guardians of a dead tradition enthralled by a mummified illusion, i believed this book would figuratively rip open their hearts like the jaws of life contraption tears open the body of a crushed automobile, or the opening of a music box releases a melody and  a mother’s voice almost forgotten and singing of sleep. Thus the millions of deadly social, political and economic diseases would fall, be felled, buried and forgotten. 

      And so i waited. And waited, and while i waited i wrote my own episodes with variations, all based on the original. 

       Keeping in mind what Gertrude Stein said to one of her students, that “remarks are not literature,” i knew all my additions, fine points and stray notes would be wasted unless gathered into a cohesive, comprehensible unity. I didn’t want o do this because it would mean stealing another author’s ideas. I continued to wait and write and haphazardly plan another author’s book in a scattered, inconsistent way. I knew it would be a waste of time to write it just to have the real author come forth with her finished, authentic product. I expected this at any time. What i might achieve could be superior to her version yet mine would still be false, stolen, a foundling. 

I continued to wait. Twenty-five years more or less have passed and this literary tornado has not struck. Meanwhile it has possessed the most fertile southern soil of my imagination. Long ago i learned not to try to force it out. Paralysis is the reward of self-censorship with psychic pinches and torments and in the end the inevitabnle return of the obsession be it demon or angel.

   The only way to escape a story is to tell it, yet this can’t be much fun if done in raw outline form. In recalling it now i want to try to make it as round as possible but i can’t be sure of every detail. I am sure of the basic design. That has never left me. I will try to be true to the original, but some parts must be my own. I hope that over the years my memory has remained true in spirit and anything i have altered will be forgiven by the real author and accepted as an honest error or the irresistible opportunity to create. The author may still be alive, may be, at this moment finishing the last chapter, or she  might be stalled and my report will spur her to completion. If so this  will ultimately be a preface or footnote or be swallowed by the shadow of a far greater creation. 

I must also accept that despite excellence of plot, roundness of characters and the overall mood, i felt, bathed in the light of love, for me to retell this story makes me a candidate for lynching. Some of the ideas are still very unpopular who have not yet matured. If repeating someone else’s story makes me a target for hate, imagine what the author must have felt and thought and how much courage it took just to write the outline and send it to me, an editor who was not sympathetic to the author’s other works. My hope is that the story retold here compels the original author to write the novel and in this way perhaps get rid of it, as Vladimir Nabokov said was his primary goal after starting a book. If publishing it in her lifetime is too frightening she might finish it and find peace in knowing the manuscript will be found and read when she is beyond retribution or praise. 

Now to Georgia’s story; Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind in a standard style as a third person narrative giving few hints of her own eccentricities, the kind we love and sometimes find embarrassing in William Faulkner and others. Very likely her characters represent Ms. Mitchell’s own eccentricities and obsessions. I expected the sequel i had received, like Gone With the Wind, to be a third person narrative in the Mitchell style. 

     The surface of Georgia’s tale is rooted in the second half of the twentieth century but has roots deep into the nineteenth. The author sets the story in the present, flashing back to events from the War Between the States to the Civil Rights Movement which was the heir and unfinished business of that war. The novel is set in modern times, in one sense, yet it can’t be called completely modern because we still live in the shadows of Sumter and Appomattox, and some of us still see slaves in the faces of their fellow Americans, almost as if history continuously drags itself bloody and pinch-hearted, ruthless and indomitable back into the parlor. 

All that is truly modern in the novel outline is the love story. This is an interracial romance and marriage, a kind of Romeo and Juliet with skin color the foe of love. The roots of the love story are the roots of the war with tendrils reaching farther back to the beginning of American racism. 

     In 1619, the year African slaves were first imported to the colonies of North America, the fear of mixing races was extreme. Blacks from any continent and no matter how well attired and mannered were thought more animal than human and sex with them the same as sex with a horse or dog.  The infusion of savage blood into the crystal purity of white womanhood was regarded by the poet Yeats not very long ago as, “pouring milk upon a stone.”

     Most geneticists have since agreed that we survive and thrive when we diversify and mingle. Mixing races results in physical strength, cunning and possibly more compassion. 

      I believe there is no rational, scientifically supported or religious justification for racism, nor is there a cure. Racism is felt and stays in the heart until the proprietor of that organ expels it. Some well born thinkers have tried to shift racism into an intellectual category, propping it up with reason, but it always slides back into fear. These arguments conducted to elevate race hatred fail because humanity is inclined to link similarities. We are more alike than different. It is easier to love than to hate and being in love is the state most longed for. 

I have my own theory about racism, fear and blood flow. Hatred requires a high level of tension; it floods the nerves with a sense of danger, greatly increasing the flow of blood to the upper torso, arms and head. Love, calm and ease sends blood to the lower body where it is needed for dancing and sex. More blood being in the lower half of the body therefore does more good for citizen and society. The key to my theory is that people think less but better with their lower bodies. Think it silly if you like, but my theory is better than any in favor of racial hatred.  

As i received it long ago, the action of the story begins like this;

It is 1954. This year the Supreme Court decides in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruling that racial segregation is unconstitutional. It requires that desegregation of public facilities be done with “all deliberate speed.”  States rights return to the national debate and the sleepy slow south gets slower but not sleepier. 

In Georgia a young white woman of fifteen or sixteen years walks with a young black man her age. People see them, people talk, but no one speaks out because this girl has a reputation for independence and a sharp wit and her family is distinguished and above reproach. The girl volunteers, at the  suggestion of her father, to tutor young negro persons of promise like this young man. His name is Junius, he is very bright and will certainly matriculate at Morehouse, Fiske or Howard and go on to a brilliant legal career. His own personal hero is Thurgood Marshal, the lawyer who argued Brown vs Board of Education before the Court.  Robert H Jackson, an associate justice of the court, known for leading the American prosecution team at the first Nazi war crime trials at Nuremburg (1945-46) and a founder and guiding spirit of international law, has just died. Young Junius is enthusiastic; now is the time for President Eisenhower to nominate a negro like Thurgood Marshal to serve on the court. The young woman counsels patience as she will regularly for most of their life together. 

“If there was a black face on the Supreme Court now,” she says, “Everyone in the south will see it as an invasion. They would see it as a new way to take away states rights. Not now, now even Washington DC is segregated.”   

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that. It may not happen very fast but it wills, it has to happen, why not ow?” Junius replies.

“It should happen right now, it’s the law. But they can get around any law if they want to. They’ve done it before,” the young woman says.

“Things have got to get right,” says Junius, the muscles of his jaw flexing.

    The young woman is named Scarlet O’Hara. Her future is as bright as the summer sun and not just because she’s an O’Hara. She’s even more gifted than her name suggests. In Georgia you can’t do better than the O’Haras. They own Tara and land all over the place and an interest in half the businesses in the state. It all started with the first Scarlet O’Hara who bore four sons and became Ma’am Scarlet. Some old ones remember her, the original Scarlet, and some of them say, never too loud, that young Scarlet now is as passionate and strong headed and clever as her great grandmother. Great grandmother Scarlet lived to be well over ninety and all the way to the end she kept a steady hand on Tara and the family business. She worked as hard or harder than her sons. Now Tara is not only a plantation, it is a school for the blind and a free Negro school. Many an African American doctor and lawyer owed their start to that school. 

Tara’s queen was shrewd in business as only a southern woman can be and as the years rolled by she diversified into textiles, logging, including tree farming and all kinds of manufacturing, in short, anything to do with Georgia. She owned a piece of Coca-Cola though she never drank it. Her philanthropic works were widely admired though not as much as her achievements in business. If someone asked her why she worked so hard she said, depending on the audience, that the south lost the war for lack of industry, not for any lack of ingenuity or courage, or, to those more concerned with the future, that providing ourselves with our own sustenance is the only way to economic independence from the north, from the rest of the world and among ourselves. 

“Among ourselves,” rang sweet in the ears of the African American community. Whatever Scarlet said, she was respected because, though beautiful and seeming frail she had a spine of steel. Though devastated by war, she stayed on the land, she worked and from her work everyone in the lands around Tara profited. Even after the Yankees took all they could carry away and burned the rest, then placed a government steeped in corruption and greed in charge of the ashes, Scarlet O’Hara stuck to the land. With the Yankee scourge finally gone she was still there, they couldn’t pluck her up. “They can only kill me,” she said, “and if they do you will bury me at Tara.” Her voice was as calm as a cool spring evening. In time her wish was granted, but they never killed her, only time could do that.          

    The old plantation house still stands beside a park and many an old Negro remembered the school the old Scarlet had built where the old slave quarters once stood, and how she had wooden floors and real windows with real glass put in them. It was her own property, she didn’t have to do it but she believed an educated servant, farmer or factory worker was better than some know-nothing who just pushes or pulls a lever or turns a knob or who plows a field all day and knows no more about anything than the mule. School can at least teach a person to be courteous. The uneducated, black or white, will be a burden on society now or in their old age. Old Scarlet’s point of view opposed the widespread belief that the more educated a working person, the more they avoid work.  Though not true of all, some educated people do avoid work.

      Ten years after the war, old Scarlet’s third husband left her without giving a damn. She soon married a confederate officer wounded in the war  who had been in her care at Tara. His name was John O’Hara, a very distant cousin. Major O’Hara was from a good family in Savannah all but wiped out by a devil named Sherman. What was left didn’t last long. He had been brought to Tara along with other casualties to recover or die. The dead were buried there in a field that Scarlet made into a park. She would not permit the plow to break that sacred soil even though it cost her dear to leave it untilled. Years later, meeting again, they made a marriage of convenience, for both of them. Very soon after they wed John O’Hara returned to do business in Atlanta or Savanna and was rarely seen at Tara. The man’s attitude was strange, a gloom punctuated by bouts of excessive jollity, almost vindictive zeal. These periods bewildered his sober associates. Many told the same story, of southern manhood refuted, defeated and now destroyed by a ruthless dissipation. Considering how it all turned out later, it was good he avoided Tara. Scarlet had four sons by John O’Hara and none of them looked like him. She all alone knew and told no one how much they looked like her third husband, he who left her ten years after the war. Major O’Hara didn’t care. He did his business, hosted tasteful, lavish affairs, traveled in the company of young men, rarely women and his credit was good, his honor untainted right up to the end. 

That was the foundation of the O’Hara family and Tara was the source of its fortune, spiritual and material. When John O’Hara died young, some said from too much fine bourbon, Scarlet was burdened with his debts. 

     She endured as she had under conditions more severe. She endured for her sons, for Tara. Her sons were not like Maj. O’Hara, they were conscientious and industrious, mostly, only one of them having gone astray by absorbing the influence of his father. This was Ashley, the youngest, the most sensitive, who tried hardest to connect with his father and be of service to him. His father repaid this loyalty by introducing Ashley to Atlanta and Savannah society, cities steeped in vice and dissipation, still wrecked by war after thirty years. After introducing him to a variety of vices, his father died and young Ashley had to pick up the scattered fragments. One of the fragments, a momento mori cassis, as Major O’Hara called it, was the Major’s officer’s revolver which the Yankees allowed him to keep after the surrender and with which Ashley compounded interest on the misery wrought by his father by putting a ball in his own head. The coroner was kind and called it an accident.

   This is why in the following years the O’Haras didn’t participate much in Atlanta society. Another reason was that soon after these tragic events men of a questionable character approached Scarlet to say they had information about her late husband and son that would be of interest and possibly worth something for her to keep from society. She told them politely but firmly to leave Tara and never return. She told her sons about the men and that they must learn to live with the fact that, “Your father was not always a gentleman. He had friends who are now making claims upon his reputation and i am unable to answer them.” 

   Scarlet’s sons answered them.

Following delivery of the answer the boys attitudes changed, they grew severe and ruthless about the family name. 

At the end of it all Scarlet could only say, “We can’t blame this on the Yankees.” It was her way of looking to the future.

The remaining sons married, some better than others, and over the next four decades the family prospered. They were more country than city. They avoided the ardent segregationists, never took part in lynching and other terrorist acts and were known among whites and Negroes alike as decent employers. Their mother told her boys at the beginning and always after to treat those with fewer advantages in life with respect. Of the former slaves she said, “Their day will come.”

That was why, almost a hundred years later, old and young, high and low stood out of young Scarlet’s way. With this as background, the story outline moves into the present, or near present day. 

Young Scarlet has spirit, the spirit of Tara, some called it, and it was good to see. The pride of Tara was moderately muted by politeness, the iron determination remained. 

Tara was now run by the father of the young Scarlet, another  John O’Hara, grandson of the original Scarlet, a veteran of the Second World War who some say changed in the war. His response; “Who can endure a war without being changed?”      

What he said in public was unlike what he said in private to his only daughter. It is something my own father, also a veteran o World War Two, told me. I vividly recall walking one sunny day thinking about what Scarlet O’Hara’s father might tell her about the sacrifices black soldiers (called Negroes at that time) made in World War Two, those who despite giving all in the fight for liberty returned home to be denied their rights. It was one of the scenes i made up. In the original it was only suggested. As i walked the uneven brick sidewalks of the old southern city where i lived and published the magazine and imagined this scene i was moved to tears. A pilot burned in a crash, a southern man, is cared for by a black doctor. As he has a bandaged face, he doesn’t know the doctor is black, but grows very fond of the man so when his bandages are removed the burned man is enlightened and no longer a racist. I tear ran down my cheek for people alive only in my imagination. They were not entirely imaginary.

My father was like John O’Hara. He wasn’t an ardent racist. His racism was a mild, half hearted sort. This might be the worst kind. He was worried that the Civil Rights movement would evolve into full scale war, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King. He worried for several months until Bobby Kennedy was shot and then he thought the whole con5ry would fall apart. He found some comfort in a bottle.

What puzzled my father was why African-Americans didn’t just move to Africa. In Africa the dollar buys much more and being an American would be advantageous generally and there are fewer white people to compete with. My father told me he didn’t understand why a black person would live in the United States at all, let alone the southern part of it. 

I mention my own father because he was like John O’Hara in his views and obviously important to the author of the Sequel outline but also because the character was fully developed. In all, the three main characters in this book plan where Scarlet, her father and the young man, Junius, introduced in the first chapter. 

Young Scarlet was intensely curious about many things, including the original Scarlet O’Hara, his grandmother, her great grandmother. He told her, “Be patient. You are very like her, but that was a different age and today we have new problems, even greater problems. We can’t look to the past. We southerners live too much in the past and now a new and possibly horrible future is bearing down on us. We must look ahead. You must live your own life first.” 

Young Scarlet trusts her father’s judgment; she takes his advice and sets aside curiosity about her great grandmother. There is enough to keep busy with today. She helps her father with the family business. When John O’Hara got carried away emotionally and was about to slip over the edge she calmed him. About the changes he spoke of he knew patience was required and told her, “You cannot make a crab walk straight.” She found occasion to remind him that he said it. He told her and no one else he believed the greatest and possibly an unstoppable engine of economic prosperity was the hunger of the black race. “They love America more than we do because America doesn’t want them and you love most what you are denied.” Prudent and shrewd, Scarlet knows that if he expresses such opinions in public he will need bodyguards. She believes him and they both know the value of silence.  

Of all the grand children and great grandchildren Scarlet is the only daughter. She was born shortly after her great grandmother died at a great age so this daughter must be named Scarlet. Though generally not a troubled child, Scarlet has troubled dreams. At various times unrelated to the course, rough or smooth, of her life, Scarlet has nightmares. One of them was a burning building and someone she loves trapped inside and she can’t get them out. The whole country is burning. There are men riding through the night dressed in bizarre clothing, carrying torches. Given the history of the state of Georgia this might be part of any southern child’s dream-world. Young Scarlet gets up in the night to look out at the modern roads, at cars passing, fields, buildings, the distant lights of the city, and no fires or torches or men on horses. She tells herself the dreams come from her reading of history and listening to old people. History may not repeat itself precisely but, if grown from the same soil must bear similar fruit.  Scarlet’s father tells her it only comes from our history. One cannot avoid history. 

There were other dreams and she had no idea where they came from.  Most puzzling to her is the man in the cellar. She is hiding him in the cellar at Tara and she comes to see him often. She is always very frightened going there but once in the darkness, the door closed and locked behind her, she feels joy and serenity. She never sees the man’s face, she only feels him near. Because she never sees his face in the light she thinks he must be ugly, mutilated or a god, as in the old story. She thinks she loves him, that’s what makes him mysterious. He might be a god as in Greek mythology. Dreaming, she dares not take a candle in to see for fear of dropping hot wax on him and waking him. Greek mythology was not taught at school, she had to find it on her own.  Modern myths, now called theories, were taught, if taught at all, with scorn, as if one can believe humanity is the issue of monkeys instead of the love of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior and His Father. 

When she first enters the cellar at Tara, awake now and carrying a flashlight, the place is entirely familiar. Was this because she had been here and had forgotten and shaped her dreams after the memory? Or did she always know what she would find there?  

To puzzle out the meaning of her dreams young Scarlet persists in asks her father to tell her more about the past, all the details. He says, ”Don’t concern yourself with it. Our country is changing now, the south is changing rapidly, the country could be falling apart, or falling together, no one knows, pay attention to what happens now. Do this, get a good start, and i promise, later i will tell you all about what happened, including all about your great grandmother.”

“Can I see a picture of her?” 

“Yes. “

He shows her an old photograph and she says. “This is too small, i can’t see her face clearly.” 

“It’s the only photo we have,” he says, looking away quickly so her eyes will not meet his and know the truth. The tiny faces in the picture are all in a group and above them, carved in the lintel of the building are the words Georgia Historical Society. A carriage is hitched up and a driver, seated with the reins, looks to the left out of the picture in the direction the horses are facing. The ladies in the carriage wear hats that shade their faces.

  “Be patient, Scarlet, please. One day you will know everything.” That’s what old people have always told young people, but her father had said please and the way he said surprised her. He says, “You will have enough and greater difficulty with what you find in your waking life. It’s the same with all of us in the south. We can’t be gripped and twisted by some old lost dream.” Scarlet trusts her father and tries to put these dreams away from her and turns her attention to the present and future.

Yet the dreams are so vivid, especially the men on horses and the cellar man. This mystery generated from the depths of her own mind follows her all her life.  

Scarlet enjoys tutoring the bright young people so much she decides to become a teacher. Her father mentions that the first Scarlet actually opened a school on Tara for the blind and the blacks. That was the only way they could get an education and there is nothing worse than an uneducated person, “I don’t care if she’s a servant or the lady of the house, there is no excuse for it.”  Young Scarlet can’t be sure she heard that statement from a dream or her father. He did tell her his grandmother expressed the opinion that Booker T. Washington was doing the right thing except that some people are naturally better with their brains than their hands and that should be a consideration. The question that naturally follows is, “How are we going to get along with each other if we’re divided between brains and brawn?” In 1954 the Supreme Court agreed.

Scarlet attends the University of Georgia for one year but feels the need to get away from home. With her father’s reluctant blessing she enrolls at New York University. A quiet life as a housewife has never been her goal. “That’s not me, Papa, i want to go places, i want to see the world, i want to do things.” In New York she lives in Greenwich Village which at first looks upside down to her. In addition to her studies she is involved in theater on stage and the street, folk music, nights of love, revolution and dreams of justice. Someone says, “Georgia, eh, land of the mob with a rope.” 

“The north,” she replies, “the land of all talk and no action.” Why don’t these people go down to Georgia and do something about it? She feels unbearably lonely for Tara.                                                                   

In the midst of alternating joy and depression she meets Junius on a street in Greenwich Village. The young man she tutored back home comes out of the faces of the crowd flooding by. Both are stunned, both know now they are deeply, irrepressibly in love. This was a sentence i remember and can remove and report word for word from the outline after which the author describes the lover’s clothing. 

“Did you go to Morehouse or to a northern college, maybe Harvard?” she asks.

“None of the above,” he says, “I went straight to the top.  I’m at Yale.”

He is so driven to excel he entered that wasp nest! He carries cards with him, studies excessively. Economics as formulated (informally) today requires that certain people moving up must belong to certain clubs and inner circles. These can only be challenged from within. Deals are made between equals on this level, between partners in a select group. The rich and privileged never rise alone; they are part of a community and project illusions of solitary accomplishment. The great houses of wealth are distinguished by titular heads, true, but they are supported by communities making sacrifices while those atop the heap sit on broad privileges saying, “My sweat, skill, charm and luck got me here.” 

Junius strives to join, to be selected, yet he knows a policy of absolute exclusion is wrong and destructive primarily to the elite foundation itself. Society must somehow include all. At the same time it is indisputable that some people are more qualified than others despite aspects of race, religion and gender. We can rise to our destined heights only if we break the shackles of these mordant definitions. 

“You are still as combative as you always were,” says Scarlet. In her heart she wants to warn him, but how?

Junius and Scarlet stop in a small place a few blocks from Washington Square that has fantastic canolis. Junius says, “How can it be otherwise for me? How can i aspire to be a man with dirt packed fingernails?”

    “Those people are important, too.”

“Oh they are, they are, Scarlet, but they don’t move. They are moved.” 

“As long as you remember that, i suppose, but here i am still teaching you. It seems now you can teach me.”

Junius is a man so filled with ideas Scarlet knows she can only do harm by trying to moderate him. 

His organic approach to society is clearly delineated in his essays which he shows to Scarlet. 

Junius is fascinated by a search into the roots of conspiracy. “Nothing is stated outright; nothing is announced or clearly illuminated in one place. It’s not a conspiracy; they simply exhibit the same behavior. They inhale and exhale at the same time without announcing it,” he says. “Though some are definitely planned, society is society according to unspoken rules. And all this is quite aside from the belief in conspiracy, that it exists or does not exist.” 

Southern people know about unspoken rules and conspiracies real and imagined. 

“Even the rich,” writes Junius, “do not consciously create a plot as much as they unconsciously form a herd.” 

“A small herd.”

“Yes, the rich are the smallest herd,” says Junius, “and the smaller it is the more idealistically rigid it becomes.”

What can a person of conscience do to find a place in this rigid idealism? An individual from any class of society is more important that the mass, it is said. As soon as an individual story is told the mass ceases to exist. To a mind perceiving it the mass is always “everyone else.” The mass does not exist until numerous individuals exhibit characteristics that define it.  And when these individuals die or abandon defining the mass they created the mass will fade into history. A mob cannot act with singleness of purpose without being told beforehand what that purpose will be. Dynamic people have often shaped the nation by compelling it to act in a way they, the mob, think they have chosen. The possibilities are open to all with imagination. History is the study of unique accomplishment, not the deeds of masses. 

Closer to home, Junius is frustrated by the problem of the poverty pimp, by black on black crime, by those with white collars and black necks who say they are involved in  helping the community while they really want to rob their brothers and sisters. This will be a growing problem.  

 “Okay, Junius, you’ve taught me enough.” Scarlet uses every bit of her charm to get him to relax and through a fissure in his clouds falls the beam of her levity.

 “Oh i know, a chicken ain’t nothin but a bird,” he says.

They admit that they have always been in love and there follows a moderately happy marriage, an active life in politics, business and law and two children, a boy and a girl. If not for tradition they could appear on the cover of ‘Perfect Couple’ magazine. True to her family and Tara, Scarlet wants to live and work in Georgia. For a mixed race couple at that time there is no rest in the south. They become part-time residents of North and South. What bothers Junius is that in the North they love him because he’s black but race is a concept, a notion, not a face they see at work or in the neighborhood every day, while in the south they hate his race but say he’s a fine man, one of the “good ones.” He struggles with it and leaves it alone, most of the time. He grows to prefer anonymity in New York. Working in Georgia, that’s good, but Scarlet knows Junius still wants to climb as high as the Supreme Court. Layers of ambition stratify him like glittering ore, dreams of standing with Thurgood Marshal. In fact, later in the story he gets to argue a case before Justice Marshal and the others and wants to tell him how much he admires him, but his tongue cleaves unto the law alone and he says nothing. Later he receives a note from Justice Marshal saying. “Let’s not forget that we who now dwell in the sun are surrounded by many who dwell in shadow.” 

‘He is there because he knows, he knows me,’ Junius thinks. Scarlet thinks Junius might explode with pride.

As the years bring wealth and ease Junius faces the contradiction of black success; the more successful one is the less one is thought to be truly black. Rich black is an oxymoron and yet the rich black is a stranger in a rich community. He has felt pressure to change, from the inside or the outside is not clear. A black Eli is indeed a strange and marvelous creature. What can he do to get back, and go back to what; give up society and the law and open a liquor store? 

It is clear that the author of the novel outline, through the character of Junius, believes an ambitious black man with brains and energy must choose between the two; become successful and disappear as a man or reject and defy the traditional masters, be a man and sink into the dust.  Do we ignore and forget history and its echoes or relive it each day making old wounds new? 

I am struck now remembering this line, ‘making old wounds new.’ It sounds Shakespearean. 

Junius is plagued by greed in various forms; the pastor who drives a Mercedes and wears tailored suits in a ghetto, the slum lord no better than the drug lord, contractors who do work that’s “good enough for the gubment.” He himself does well but an Eli can’t help but do well, if not good. And why are rates of improvement so low and slow? You help and help and help and they continue living badly. Their diets are deadly; they prey on each other, especially the talented, ambitious ones who try to get ahead, who hustle. When they do get ahead and stay in the old neighborhood the others quickly close in on them for a cut.  He calls them the holy poley and all you can do is save some of them, for a short time, then hope they don’t fail again worse than they failed before. 

No one rises alone, Junius has to bring others with him, but they are sluggish at best. At last only those who love the law, purely, as an abstract codification of human behavior black or white, interest him.

Scarlet says, “Try and focus on our successes.”

“That’s right,” he says, “Only success is important.” 

Another thought persists; if he fails he will be forgotten. He has built walls and they are closing in. He sees monuments, maybe he wants to be a monument, but those figures in brass or stone can’t leave the pedestals and live. They have to be dead to be up there and dead means they’ve stopped working for change.  

The author of the sequel was obviously infatuated with Junius.  Scarlet is a character she can’t tinker with but Junius, being freshly created, can be expanded and illuminated.   

The two children that bless the union of Scarlet and Junius, like many young people, eventually want to do things their own way and most of the time have no idea what their parents are talking about. What use is the NAACP? Why should we worry about anyone’s race? That’s all history.

Here we should note that the author has projected a few years into the future, giving the story a dawn of the 21st century bump. In the first twenty years of the narrative their marriage is equally divided between north and south. They raise the kids moving around a lot and when the kids leave home Scarlet realizes Junius prefers to stay in the north. In her middle age she announces her intention to stay at Tara more, with or without him. She has been going back every year to help her father and contribute to the material prosperity of Tara. Now she feels her father needs her more than does Junius.

      I recall no mention in the outline of any reaction of Scarlet’s parents to her marriage. In the entire outline Scarlet’s mother is not mentioned, nor are any siblings noted. If this is an oversight we can attribute it to my lack of memory or the author’s intense interest in Scarlet, her father and Junius.  Although the novel is the most inclusive artistic creation devised it can’t include everything.

    When it comes to the parts about specific people like Thurgood Marshal and Norman Mailer, the latter for whom the author has a peculiar dislike, i am certain of the outline specifics. I am confident that even though i have had to paraphrase, i am sure of the central meaning the characters wish to express or the author wants to expresses through them. In spots the patches of dialogue were included, probably to illuminate character or significant moments. I think these were moments when, for the author, the tale was too hot to stop and too cool to drop.  Her dislike of Mailer may be rooted in the southern woman’s abhorrence of and attraction to men who too roughly take command. It may have something to do with Mailer taking for wife a southern woman much younger than himself. All the politics in the outline have a mildly liberal inclination.  

After the introduction of characters and marriage of Scarlet and Junius, the novel delves into contemporary history. We are taken for a stroll through events of the Civil Rights Movement from Brown vs Board of Education to a day when black religious and community leaders, one of them a friend of Scarlet O’Hara, visit Ronald Reagan in the White House. They tell the president he is despised in the black community and is thought to be a devil. This was said to amaze and trouble Reagan so much he meets with his advisors to see how to get more blacks into the GOP. 

“We are doing that, sir, by cultivating blacks in the business sector all through the south.” Reagan is reassured as he often appeared to be by someone telling him something was being done. After this meeting one senior level advisor calls another aside and suggests there is an issue deeper than getting black votes involved here, a fundamental difficulty with the president’s concern. 

“A deeper issue, what is that?”

“The real question; do we want a bunch of niggers in the GOP?”

What a fine Democrat the author is! She recognizes what American political  parties truly stand for and if you don’t believe me look up Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy.’ 

This is the only time the author uses the N word and she uses it with perfect pitch and a powerful punch. Can a novel set mostly in the south with the basis of most of its plot the Civil Rights Movement and an interracial marriage avoid copious use of that word? It takes genuine literary skill to avoid it until the tone is ripe, then to drop it from exactly the right mouth flapping open at precisely the right altitude. 

     While Junius, best of the best, goes right to the top and Scarlet is active in her own right the players are established, the scenes unroll and the novel cruises through history.  

They are still in school during the Montgomery bus boycott and they hear some say, “You can’t do that in Georgia!”

1957 ~ Scarlet’s father, John O’Hara, is disappointed in Ike for not moving faster in Little Rock. “Fabus is just keeping his bigots in line,” he says to Scarlet. “Or did Ike stall because he had some plan to keep the southern GOP happy and lure away democrats?” 

Freedom riders, “They going to stick out like a wart on a nose,” her father says. The result was far worse than he thought it would be. 

James Meredith and George Wallace; “Wallace knows how to put on a show.”

Scarlet and Junius are in Washington in late August.1963 to hear Martin Luther King. Later, when JFK is assassinated she hears from her father that sure enough segregationists did it. “They think Johnson, a southern man, will restore segregation.” John O’Hara tells his daughter they may know what changes in society are inevitable but still they want to show off their superb southern marksmanship and get rid of that Irish Catholic smart ass. He didn’t do a damn thing to keep King and his people in line.

Muhammad Ali is really more troubling than Malcolm X because Ali is a sports hero and admired by the majority. Ali can fight, and talk, Malcolm X only talks.

MLK was killed because he came out against the Vietnam War, calling it a race war. The assassination of RFK is the real blow; he had the potential to make immediate change. He would have got us out of Vietnam now, like his brother wanted. Junius says there’s no sense in arguing which dead man is more important, they were all important. 

Then at the Chicago convention mayor Richard J Daley orders the beating of young idealists in the street. What does he want to do, make the Democratic party into an elitist labor organization? If it is still the big tent can Daley crush change out of it? What’s he worried about? Junius volunteers to help counsel the Chicago Seven and works with William Kunstler, who lacks tact and is more theater than law and he doesn’t like this. Kunstler says, “Junius, get with the program, it’s the way we work now.” He loves the man and the cause, but is at best uneasy with his attention grabbing methods. He concludes that Kunstler is an unstable personality with a brilliant legal mind. 

The law, he begins to suspect, is not simple enough to get into books though ultimately what will endure is what can be put in the books.

The author of the outline is vague about Scarlet’s business and community work, maybe we don’t need to know much about it or it is not a subject many southern women are involved in and know intimately. If needed later, details can be added.  

Black Panthers ~ this movement was on the author’s list but there was no explication anywhere. Possibly the details would be added later. Some writers might slide over unfamiliar parts of their story in a drive for the finish line. This is a bad habit, according to the write-what-you-know school of literature, because what is done without knowledge later learned may warp the story. Any unnatural or unexpected torque at points along the body of the story may tear the surface fabric, exposing ligaments, bones and muscle. Infection and blood loss may result. It is generally dangerous to avoid doing the hardest part of anything for very long. The hardest part should be done first and this might make the rest unnecessary. But let us be patient with our gentlewoman who has risked so much thus far. We can allow her a few faded spots.  Or the spot is bleached from my memory. I don’t think so. She mentioned the fiery rhetoric and fanatic devotion of a young black leader named Eldridge Carmichael. In my return correspondence i suggested that Stokely and Mr. Cleaver may not appreciate getting mixed up. The anger of young black men is something many whites, South and North, choose to avoid, going so far as to miss such an error.

Likewise does she skip and skimp on details in meeting with Norman Mailer. She depicts the novelist in the most unflattering terms suggesting he over-compensates to protect a shaky ego and hide a lack of confidence. The outline author obviously preferred modest men. She may also have resented Mailer’s many marriages, especially to a younger woman from Arkansas. Why is this important to her? The seventies were Mailer’s years of mismanaging his relations with the women’s movement. Maybe she felt he should have written about Vivian Leigh instead of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer’s overconfident, overbearing attitude, as perceived by some women, may be offensive, but to include instead of ignore him indicates a strong interest in the novelist. The radical nature of her own story indicates a willingness to shake off tradition. In addition to this, why Mailer is added remains mysterious; he was not key to the civil rights movement and his character doesn’t serve to advance the narrative. I remember mention of Mailer in the outline distinctly because a few months before receiving the outline i read The Executioner’s Song.  I think it’s a very good book. 

With Norman Mailer we arrive at the present day, the time i received the outline, the mid nineteen eighties.

Junius sees one solution to the problems addressed by the Civil Rights Movement, now thirty years on and still in development, to form an organization called CORCO; Corporate Cooperation; lawyers representing deserving but underserved poor clients with funding from corporations and governments. The motto; “Focus on talent.” He believes the greatest harm to society is lack of legal representation of the poor. This is why the execution rates of African Americans are so high. 

The second and simultaneous purpose of CORCO is to identify and encourage talent. The first goal is short term, action now, the second is long term. Success grows from the careful cultivation of talent. The truest test and ultimate purpose of law and government are to protect the most vulnerable, the least of our brethren. Will Junius succeed in joining the law to uplif5t the heavy laden? Normally lacking the common touch, he surprises everyone by responding to this question with, “One never knows, do one?” His desire to try and relax indicates his confidence in the project. 

The press covers the beginning of this innovative governmental/business/charity plan but in making the announcement and describing the goals and methods of the organization Junius makes statements that antagonize some of his intended supporters. “We are not equal in qualities as people, we are only equal before the law. The great balancing scales of justice weigh us all equally, but in the contest to determine who among us is more or less talented; this depends solely on us and how we conduct our lives.” He might be forgiven for his love of a strict interpretation of the law and less of an interest in human sympathies. His critics hit him hard, using against him the word fairness.  

This free law service ends in the private and public grant money being taken by those in the organization who are authorized to determine how to spend it.  Initially, it is spent on the cause, then more and more money is spent on their salaries. They pay themselves more until the money is gone. They pay too much for office rent, copiers, vehicles; everything except the legal needs of the poor. They took a tip from Ronald Reagan, whose job it was to delegate authority and soon, like Reagan, they only appeared to work. As the system evolved those doing the least are paid the most. 

Scarlet also grows frustrated by people she helps. She has to accept that humanity grows like nature, fluctuating with the seasons. In all, the changes in the community lack the expected grandeur.  

CORCO runs well as long as Junius watches every move. It wears him out and he has a heart attack. Scarlet comes to see him where he is dying. He lies in the hospital bed; the heart monitor shows a jagged line but is silent because Junius requested the sound, the pinging, erratically wavering echo be turned off. He disliked the beat, not rhythmic, more like a slow ride over a potholed road.  

“Scarlet, i wonder if i ever did anything worth anything.”

“Of course you did, how can you think that?”

”I don’t know,” he turned to her, “and i attacked you, didn’t i?”

“Not at all, where do you get these notions?”

 “I always had to attack someone. I’m dying, it surprised me, Scarlet. A few days ago i felt like i owned the world, i was going to conquer all, i would live forever. At least that’s how i started the day.”

“We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass.”

“How true, and so it ends in failure, after all.”

“You’re not going to die, the doctor has confidence, and as for the world, you conquered my world. I’m glad you did.”

“I wish i could believe that.”

They are silent, Scarlet standing by the bed, Junius slightly elevated. 

“You shouldn’t be worried too much, you have a good life. You’re not going to die.”

“I had a good life? I don’t give a damn about that.” 

“Oh really, Junius, you can’t mean that.”

“I’m dying. I mean everything i say.”

“I don’t think it’s true. I think of your dedication.”

“Right now, all i have is the truth. It’s good. It’s bad. I have to decide and it makes no difference either way.”

She looks at the monitor, the line erratic.

“You did more good, with Tara, with the business.”

“Thank you, Junius, but i do not like hearing you run yourself down,” she said. She abruptly stopped. The least said the better. Anything she says encourages him to be harder on himself.

“It’s true, that’s all there is to it, the numbers tell the tale better than anything else. All the rest, how we wish people would be less greedy, how greed is need, then no one moves without the need, and greed takes it over and pulls it down, all a downward spiral. Vanity of vanity.”

He is too tense. Standing by his bedside, Scarlet feels the length of his body stiffen. She takes his hand with both of her hands.

After a long moment Junius says, “How i wish they were all clear,” as if that word, clear, came to him on a flash of light, “just clear. How i wish people were not black or white, just clear.”

“So we could see through them. That would be nice.”

“Nice. I’m a nice idealist.”

“Please Junius, please don’t distress yourself. You’re supposed to be resting.” 

    That is not what he did. He continued to distress himself.  Death rose in him, he felt it. She wanted to tell him this was no way to get well, but it was too late.  He had to know what she thought because she had been saying it for so long. Relax. Take time to recover yourself and the strain will leave your heart. But he never would have made it through Yale or even out of Georgia without the ambition now killing him.

“I must sleep, Scarlet. Please let me sleep and stay close. I need you.”

“I’ll stay. I’ll be right here.”

He fell asleep after lieing with his eyes open for an hour. She sat in his room listening to his breathing and slept in the chair and woke with a sore neck and went out. Soon after this he slipped into a coma. The doctor told her they would have to investigate what happened but for now there was nothing they could tell her.  He said the hospital would find her a room for the night in and would call when he knew more. After three days spent walking around the hospital and the neighborhood around the hospital and talking on the phone, Junius all the while in a coma, Scarlet left for Georgia, planning to return quickly. Junius died at five-thirty am on the day she was to return. No one was there with him in the early morning before his darkness lifted. 

In Georgia Scarlet picks up the phone and hears her daughter say, “Daddy died this morning,” She is at the hospital.

“Where is Junius Jr?” 

“Chicago. He’ll be here soon.”

Scarlet is in her office when she puts down the telephone and tells her secretary of her husband’s death. 

Her secretary says, “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks, but you needn’t be sorry. He always pushed too hard.”

Her secretary looks at her with eyes that hide more than they reveal. 

“No, that’s not it,” says Scarlet, “it’s more like he pushed too hard against something that pushed back harder.”

A tear surprises Scarlet, she pulls a tissue from the box on the desk.

       “I’ll make arrangements so you can leave right away,“ the secretary says and turns to her telephone. At this point in the narrative we approach the first years of the 21st century and the narrative, completed approximately 15 years earlier, does not include making reservations on-line.    

   Two days after Junius was buried, Scarlet receives a call from the hospital where her father is said to be dying. I’ve already had enough of this, she thinks and goes to see her father. John O’Hara, talking to her by phone, his voice very weak, implores her to hurry; he has important news. 

Propped up in his hospital bed John O’Hara asks her to sit and tells her the story.  They all heard stories about a man in the cellar. It was the darkest secret so no one in the family told her about him. Some of them thought the man was black.  He had a blackened, disfigured face, it was said. Others said he wasn’t black or white, but too ugly to be any race at all.  He was also blind and on those occasions when he left the cellar to sit in the sun in the high walled garden the first, old Scarlet had built for him he lightly wrapped his entire head in gauze. No one saw him except Scarlet and trusted servants. He was said to be very wise, a blind man with better vision than others with perfect sight.  

John O’Hara says, “You will find all this, all you need to know, in a small leather trunk in the attic at Tara. I have had them put it out for you. The key is here, i have carried it for fifty years, since the day my father gave it to me. It has been heavy, it has felt like it would drag me right down to the ground.”

He gives her the key.

“I didn’t want to tell you about your strange dreams and the rest or about your great grandmother because i didn’t want your interest in her to take over your life. I knew it would dominate you, I wanted you to live 

in the present and the future. The past is a disease clinging to the south. An obsession with the past can consume and destroy the future. That’s certain as an obsession with wealth or power or land. I saw you were going good with Junius. It killed him but he was a man destined to die for a cause. I am sorry for you and him, that he could not find peace in this life. Peace could only come to him with total victory. There is no end to the battle he fought.” He pauses to breathe and continues, “For him it was victory or death.”

“I told you as little as possible about our family past because there are too many ghosts in it.” 

     “My grandmother saved the plantation but she didn’t save it alone. There were the blacks who stayed around and  helped her and there was the man in the cellar. She married John O’Hara for his name and place in society, no more. This didn’t do her much real good. He never planted anything. Their marriage was never consummated. They met when he was dying at Tara, a wounded man. Many died at Tara. He lived and after recovering he had almost nothing to do with Scarlet or Tara; all she needed was his name. He lived a dissipated life in Atlanta and Savannah while Scarlet’s real husband shared with her the farm and the hardship of rebuilding it. He was a blockade runner, a gambler named Rhett Butler. He was Scarlet’s real husband, her third, and they fought and he had left her. He left Tara from the death bed of a family friend, Melanie Wilkes, and was determined never to return. Then he found himself in a situation he could not extract himself from without dishonor. Night riders were burning some former slaves out of their shacks and he attempted to stop them. They beat him and burned out his eyes, burned off his face. I was told his lips were burned off so he grinned perpetually. He had to have a sponge or towel always handy to be sure his mouth remained . . . you see, without lips it is difficult to control saliva. I know, it is hideous.”             

      “’Man, what corner of Earth is not full of thy calamity,’” Scarlet quoted Virgil, a statement they both favored.

  “They left him for dead and those who survived brought him to Tara. The other survivors were taken in. Having arrived with them, he was thought to be black until they washed him. There he stayed, so hideously disfigured he had to hide in the cellar. The gauze wrap or hood he wore outside in the small, high –walled garden she built for him was like the hoods worn by the demons who disfigured him. This man could not be defeated. He was your great grandfather.”

The four O’Hara sons were the fruit of Rhett Butler’s loins. Scarlet went to him, she loved him. She must have looked into his face from time to time, and still she loved him.

Just so, the plantation and family survive to this day. You will find all this in the journals and letters, quite business like, even cold, but complete. All the family secrets are in that trunk. My own father gave me the key and it has hung like lead around my neck ever since. After you were born and i saw how you were coming up, i knew this would all be important to you, but i had to keep it from you, i am sorry, it would have consumed you. I knew it would because it was such a burden on me and i’m just an old Georgia farmer. I may die now unburdened. You will also find the only other photo of your great grandmother in that trunk. You will know when you see her why i have had to keep all this from you. Good judgment or bad, it is what i did. All will be revealed, all known, as it says in The Book.” 

This was his last effort; all color left his face and his head sunk into the pillow. What he had said had drained all his strength. Within twenty-four hours John O’Hara died. He is buried according to his wishes not at Tara among family and confederate dead but in the church yard at St. Mary of the Roses at Tintagel. Though far from Tara, he felt a ‘soul tie’ to the place and the men he served with in the war also buried there.

Later that day Scarlet opens the trunk, set out for her and dusted off.. An odor of moth balls rises. She takes out the bundles of letters and notebooks written in a close script. It is a fair hand, upright, clear, concentrated, familiar yet strange.  Wedged among the sheets of paper is the photo of her great grandmother. At first Scarlet is confused. The woman’s hair is done up in an old style and her high collar is old-fashioned, but the set of her lips and jaw, the look in her eyes; direct, confident, fierce and patient, she knows this look well; she could be looking in a mirror. She realizes with a dreadful shudder of joy spanning a century and a half that there has always been only one Scarlet O’Hara.

This is how the outline of the sequel to Gone With the Wind, as i received it over thirty years ago, ends. 

For a few months after reading it i reflected on the potential of the story. Editors often ponder ‘potential,’ it’s one of our favorite phantoms. I had read Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy and enough of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and wondered if the sequel author had also read them and was inspired by their themes of reincarnation. Though she obviously disliked Mailer perhaps his Egyptian novel appealed to her enough that she could ignore the public image he so earnestly projected.  No southern woman i spoke to approved of Mishima’s work. Both Mishima and Mailer were popular, not scholarly novelists. The women i spoke to were all academics and the magazine i edited was not respected among them. This may have caused a block in communication. I’d like to think the author of the sequel was free of such literary constipation at least in privacy of her study. The radical nature of the story itself and that it was written, or admitted to, conceived, and sent to me or anyone at all, indicates a willingness to refute or be flexible with tradition.                

Who does this story belong to now? What did the original author do with it? Does the person live, have they completed it and the manuscript rests in an old truck in an attic? Perhaps a more important question is; where does any literary work truly come from and ultimately who owns it? I have no idea where it comes from but i think it is owned by those who read and remember it and live by it. 

We might find additional comfort in literary history. The most complete explanation of the source of Shakespeare’s plays can be instructive. The true author of his plays was William Shakespeare; he wrote them down, but who created them? Shakespeare himself gives us broad hints in two of his plays. In Hamlet the writing of The Mousetrap and in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream the bunglers of the Pyramis and Thisbe disaster demonstrate how Elizabethan dramas were probably, in part, composed. A plot and general character idea and maybe a few lines were given and actors told to deliver them “trippingly on the tongue.” This tongue tripping would be noted by the playwright and retained. If he liked what he heard he wrote it down. Shakespeare was an actor, the Queen and King’s men were family. They shared more than a bed; they shared the creation of the plays. How much? No one can know. History errs in giving one person all the credit, but history cannot shave close enough to reveal all the authors of the plays. Shakespeare started as an actor, he knew the craft. A theater group like the Queen  or the King’s Men is a family so when the company needed a story they turned to Shakespeare, the brightest one of the lot, he gave then the general shape of it and they improved it. He helped improve it. Note also that when the theaters were closed in the late 1590s he turned to poetry, not drama. His plays were written on the stage with varying degrees of help from actors and others. Shakespeare was at the center of it, he was not all of it. The plays had one scribe and many authors. 

    Here is a more recent example. In the late 1930s the Marx brothers in their films were getting fewer and fewer laughs. Public attention was turning from Depression woes to interest in world events. They rewrote scripts and tried different gags and nothing worked until they took their show in the road. Going on the road was getting back to basics for the three and sometimes four old vaudvillians. They had started in vaudeville. They put on their show and listened to the audience and kept the parts that got laughs. These funny parts went into their next film and it was a hit. The brothers from the east nineties of Manhattan were good listeners, like the chap from Stratford-on-Avon, England.

What difference does it make where the story comes from as long as it moves us and is true? Truth is established in literature in one way; we believe it.  We believe it because we recognize it; some part of it comes from us, is derived from us. If it were possible to achieve absolute originality no one would recognize it. This story was conceived by one person but it comes from a community, it was an effort to advance the spirituality, ideas and emotions of one person and the community sees it.

I hope the original author of this sequel will return or be vindicated in some way by this retelling of the story. I hope she will forgive my mistakes in retelling it. What i have written is not complete. It is not the real thing. We should keep looking for the real, original story. Only the complete story told by the original author in the fullness of passion and awareness is enough and that is just the beginning.                                            

end of “Sequel to a Dream”