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Tavis: Alice Randall received high praise for her first novel, 'The Wind Done Gone,' a parody of the classic 'Gone With The Wind.' She's also an accomplished songwriter and screenwriter and has just released her second novel, 'Pushkin and the Queen of Spades.' There's the cover of this new book on your screen as we speak. Alice Randall, nice to see you.

Alice Randall: Tavis, it's wonderful to be with you.

Tavis: I am glad to have you on the program. Before I get to it, to 'Pushkin,' the new novel--this is my first time having a chance to talk to you on television, so I've got to go back to 'The Wind Done Gone,' 'cause you kicked up a controversy around that book, really, for those who know the story, pushing the limits of parody and what the Constitution protects, what our law, rather, protects when it comes to parodies. Tell me the story of how you were able to push the limits as far as you did and where that actually ended up.

Randall: You know, the Margaret Mitchell estate sued my publisher for $10 million, trying to stop publication of my book. I didn't think I pushed the limits 'cause I took them back to our basics. African Americans have a tradition of coded parody, going back to the cakewalk dance, and I was writing in that tradition. But too many people have forgotten about our tradition, and so they didn't understand that they were any people who didn't like 'Gone With The Wind,' and they thought I was trying to piggyback on it. I said, 'You could write a sequel to ‘Gone With The Wind.' It would be called ‘Uncle Tom Goes to Tara.''

Tavis: Ha ha!

Randall: But that's not what I wrote. I wrote a critique of Margaret Mitchell's book that was honoring all the black women who had lived and had felt damaged by that book and all the black women who worked for people in homes who still love 'Gone With The Wind.' So that's... But I definitely wrote a parody. I went to Harvard, and I studied parodies. They're almost as old as the novel. Richardson wrote 'Pamela.' Fielding came along and wrote 'Shamela,' and that's how we got the word 'sham.' But unfortunately, some people didn't think that a black woman could write an intellectual parody, and it was actually misapprehended initially.

Tavis: They didn't think it was cute at all, hence the $10-million lawsuit. What actually happened? What was the end result of that lawsuit?

Randall: Well, we had to go to the second court, the Federal Appeals Court. And the second court reversed the decision completely of the first judge and called it an egregious abuse of judicial discretion. The first judge had basically said that I couldn't have written a parody, that that's just an argument that some lawyers tried to put in after the fact. And, in fact, the book is now being taught in 17 universities. At Wesleyan, it's one of the preeminent examples of American parody. It's taught at Harvard, Princeton, a lot of black colleges, Vanderbilt.

Tavis: If I understood this correctly, though, and you tell me 'cause you were obviously in the middle of it, didn't the decision ultimately render that in the future people have to put, like, a phrase, 'unauthorized parody,' on the cover of the book or somehow denote that if they're going to do something similar to what you did in the future?

Randall: They made us do that on my book. They made us put a little red sign. But we've been pointing out that inside the book in the very first paragraph, it says 'genuine peridot,' which is a homonym for 'genuine parody.' The book really announced that, and as we said that in the case that this thousand-page book with the Confederate flag on its side, it's hard to think anybody confuses it with this slim book with a black woman on the front. They basically, Tavis, when it comes down to this, they tried to use the copyright act to create censorship, and that's something we're gonna have to be worried about in America until we get that balance. The copyright act is now being used to create censorship.

Tavis: That's a whole 'nother show. We'll talk about that some other time. Um, for the purposes of this conversation, though, let me advance, talk about some other issues I want to talk about. Namely, this new book, 'Pushkin.' But you don't just write books. You write songs.

Randall: Yes, I do.

Tavis: I have to confess this, I had no idea that... I know you live in Nashville.

Randall: I do.

Tavis: Had no idea that you were a writer of songs, country music songs...

Randall: Yes.

Tavis: But, better than that, you've written a number-one country song by Trisha Yearwood.

Randall: Yes. 'Xxxs and Ooos (An American girl).'

Tavis: Who knew?

Randall: I'm very proud of that. And it says, 'She's got her God, she's got good wine, Aretha Franklin, and Patsy Cline. She's an American girl.' I'm really excited--also, I've written a song that was recorded on an album that was nominated for a Grammy, that was about a man who got lynched between his wedding and his reception--a black man. And I'm asking people to come to account about that. I said that we needed to um--there are a lot of places where black contributions haven't been recognized. Like people look at a bluegrass band and they say, 'What does that have to do with black people?' And the banjo--staring at a banjo--is an instrument invented by Africans in these Americas.

Tavis: Although, as you well know, people think country music--I mean, the one black name that always stands out is Charley Pride. But once you get beyond Charley Pride, though, nobody's thinking about black women writing number one hit country music songs.

Randall: Particularly not my father. When I did it, he almost--I can't even tell you on a PBS show what my father used to say about it when I started. But, you know, Ray Charles did write modern--and honoring his death, his passing this year. He was a genius that worked in all of these different genres, in R&B. But he wrote modern sounds of country and western music, and he really revolutionized country music.

Tavis: What do you get out of writing country and western songs? And, of all the music that you could write, how did you end up writing country and western as opposed to R&B or pop or...

Randall: You know, I was born in Motown, which is a great song--

Tavis: Detroit.

Randall: Detroit city in '59.

Tavis: Makes the question more fascinating. You went from Detroit to Nashville.

Randall: But see, Detroit left me and went to L.A. in the interim. Ha ha! Um, but more than that--you know, Aretha Franklin recorded a lot of songs that are mostly soul, but for me, it was the same thing about writing about 'The Wind Done Gone'-- writing the book about 'Gone With The Wind.' I wanted to come and preach to the unconverted. And when I can claim, on 'American Girl,' and talk about Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline in the same sentence, I'm trying to build a different relationship to America. And when I have people who listen to country music only listening about a man who gets lynched between his wedding and reception and asking what is their responsibility in that... Those are important questions to raise. I'm not answering it. I'm raising that question. So I wanted to preach to the unconverted, not preach to the converted, and I have had some really interesting experiences. When I first went down there, the first man put his feet up on the desk and he shook his head and said, 'I don't see it. I don't see it at all. I think you need to go back from where you came.' And you know...'Go back to where you came from.' That's when I determined I was staying. And I stayed--ha ha ha ha!

Tavis: If he said 'leave,' you were gonna stay. Let me talk about 'Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,' this new novel here, and there are a couple of themes that run through this book that I want to pick up on and ask you about in just a second here. But let me give you a second to explain, in your own words, what the novel is about.

Randall: Black woman who has a child between her freshman and sophomore at Harvard raises him to be the most intellectual black boy in the world, names him Pushkin X, after Malcolm X and Pushkin. Now he's a defensive lineman for the Titans about to marry a white Russian lap dancer, and mama's not even invited to the wedding.

Tavis: OK. Ha ha ha!

Randall: So--ha ha ha!

Tavis: That's a novel for you right there. There are a couple of things in this novel, though, that I want to get to, not the least of which is, protecting your child. There's a whole notion in this book about protecting children, and there's a lot of conversation about that in today's society, but you tackled that in a different way in this book.

Randall: Yes. I'm very concerned that in the post-Brown era, 50 years after Brown, that-- When I was a little girl, I was in an all-black kindergarten. The smartest person was black, the dumbest person was black, the richest person was black. It's a different world now where children are exposed to a lot of different things, a lot of opportunities, but injuries from a very early time. And also in some of our history and personal experiences, there's some very devastating things. And there are questions about how much of this you have to shield our children from, when we can get them to know, and I'd say a mother has to protect--a little boy may need to be shielded. A man needs to know. And Windsor is a mother who has to go through the journey. She's shielded him from some hard truths about America, hard truths about her family--

Tavis: How about herself?

Randall: And hard truths about herself. And she is getting so rigid and cold, she's about to lose his love. She says if she doesn't let him know her more, he may not be able to continue to love her. But that's a problem many of us had to go through in our lives, to know when our children are grown enough to know.

Tavis: Grown enough to know, and I've had that experience in my own family. There were things that my mother had to wait until I was a certain age to tell me. But I suspect there's also, certainly in African American families, this dilemma that people are fraught with trying to figure out when you share and if to share those stories.

Randall: Yes, and also I think there's a wonderful tradition of protective lies. I hope I can tell this story. Windsor has a story that her father told her. She would hear this little story--white folks always keep you down, white folks do that. She didn't know who white folks were, because she lived in an all-black community. He told her that white folks was a little dog who used to protect these women of the night, and he said no matter where you go, remember that white folks ain't nothin' but a broken-down street dealer's dog. But what's wonderful about that is Windsor used--her little ego was protected, and she didn't feel assaulted, and later she's able to move that to a generosity to include and finally embrace her son's white fiancee--that she went from being so protected that she could be generous.

Tavis: Speaking of the white fiancee--I've only got a minute or so to go here--but speaking of that white fiancee, that whole issue of interracial relationships clearly is in this book.

Randall: Absolutely. And why is it that so many black men do choose white women and why are black women offended by that, and is it time to move beyond, time to understand race as more of a cultural construct that people can move in and outside of, that it's about beauty?

Tavis: Are folk ready for that? It's a wonderful notion, but are folk really ready to accept that notion, though, that race is something that we can move in and out of? Race is still the most intractable issue in this country, I think.

Randall: Absolutely. And they're only ready to move in and out of it if they're willing to see the beauty in black women, children, ideas, minds, aesthetics. Those who can really see the beauty in what we are doing, what we are about, they are willing and can move beyond it.

Tavis: I am out of time and we are just scratching the surface here of 'Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,' a novel by Alice Randall, the author of 'The Wind Done Gone.' Alice, nice to see you.

Randall: Tavis, it's wonderful to be with you.

Tavis: We could do this for hours. I'll have to read the rest of this when I get off the air here. Nice to see you.

That's our show for tonight. As always, you can catch me on the radio on NPR, and I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles and as always, keep the faith.