Gone With the Wind and I are the same age. We both appeared in 1936, so perhaps that is why I have such an affinity for it.

Scarlett would understand. “Atlanta had always interested her more than any other town because when she was a child Gerald had told her that she and Atlanta were exactly the same age.” She later dis- covered that Gerald had stretched the truth somewhat; the city was founded as Terminus and later renamed Marthasville, but in 1845, the year of her birth, it was christened Atlanta.

People often ask me how many times I’ve read Gone With the Wind, but I can’t tell them because I don’t know. I was eight the first time, and I have been re-reading it ever since. Not once a year, from cover to cover, the way some people read the Bible; I just keep reading it—over and over, here and there, this part and that part, wherever it happens to fall open. I’m now fifty-seven, so you figure it out.

On the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, I compiled for The Washington Post Book World a page of quizzes and puzzles (Ashley’s real first name, Rhett’s middle initial, etc.) off the top of my head, without having to check the text. And when I needed to find the passages I quote in this essay, I knew exactly where they were and turned right to them.

Whenever I shop for a new typewriter or computer, I always test it with the opening paragraph. As soon as the salespeople see “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful....” they invariably start looking over my shoulder and stay locked in place until I get to the end. I never consciously memorized it, nor any of the other passages I know by heart; they simply engraved themselves on my mind over countless rereadings.

The first time I read it my grandmother laid low for once, obviously hoping it would inspire me to stop reading altogether and become the Southern belle she wanted me to be. She refrained from saying “Get your nose out of that book!” and waited for me to identify with Scarlett.

But how could I? “Large numbers of books always depressed her, as did people who liked to read large numbers of books.”

Other than a short-lived tomboyish admiration for the Tarleton twins, I’ve never identified with any of the characters. Nor does the book trigger my incorrigible vice—as much as I love the story, I have never found anything to underline. The famous “As God is my witness” pledge is much better in the movie. In the book it’s little more than a passing thought, and lacks the rhythm of the screenwriter’s lines.

Now that I have passed the reader-identification age I find that the book brings out the literary detective in me.

Knowing that a novelist never invents a character who serves no purpose, I found a loose thread that Margaret Mitchell neglected to snip off.

In chapter forty-three, Scarlett asks Rhett why he goes to New Orleans so often, adding that Atlanta’s gossips believe he has a sweetheart there. He replies: “It isn’t a sweetheart that takes me to New Orleans. It’s a child, a little boy...he is my legal ward and I am responsible for him. He’s in school in New Orleans. I go there frequently to see him.”

In chapter forty-five, when Melanie and Belle Watling converse in Belle’s carriage, Belle compliments Melanie’s son and says: “I got a boy my self... He ain’t here in Atlanta. He ain’t never been here. He’s off at school.”

Obviously, Belle had a son by Rhett. No further mention is made of him, but an illegitimate child is such a standard plot complication that we can be fairly certain Mitchell originally planned to make use of this boy and later changed her mind, probably for reasons of length, but forgot to delete the references to him.

Even more intriguing is her idée fixe  on hair color. Scarlett, her mother Ellen O’Hara, Rhett, and Bonnie all have black hair, but Mitchell went even further and flouted the historical novelist’s time-honored convention of making the sweet girl a blonde.

In the barbecue scene Melanie’s hair is called “a dark mass,” but we get a specific description in chapter nine: “Melanie rustled in from her room, a worried frown puckering her forehead, a brush in her hands, her usually tidy black hair, freed of its net, fluffing about her face in a mass of tiny curls and waves.”

All of the heroic/good characters who do not have black hair are redheads. The red-haired Tarleton twins are introduced on page one, and soon thereafter we meet their mother, “So white of skin that her flaming hair seemed to have drawn all the color from her face into its vital burnished mass...she had borne eight children, as red of hair and full of life as she.”

We begin to scent obsession when Mitchell describes the Tarleton girls in their carriage on the way to the barbecue. “All shades of red hair were represented beneath these hats, Hetty’s plain red hair, Camilla’s strawberry blonde, Randa’s coppery auburn and small Betsy’s carrot top.”

To top it off—literally—the madam with heart, Belle Watling, is a dyed redhead, and lest we forget the earlier association, Mammy reminds us of it the first time she sees her. “Ah ain ’ never seed ha’r dat color in mah life. Not even in de Tarleton fambly.”

Mitchell herself had black hair so we can understand how her vanity might have gotten the best of her when she colored in her main characters, but why so much red hair for the minor ones? The solution to this mystery eluded me for years, until recent biographies of Mitchell revealed that her first husband, Berrian Kinnard Upshaw, was nicknamed “Red.” The tonal similarities of “Red Upshaw” and “Rhett Butler” are obvious, but what is really fascinating is the middle name.

When Belle Wading gives Melanie a contribution for the hospital, the gold coins are wrapped in a man’s handkerchief that Scarlett immediately recognizes. “There was a monogram in the corner in which were the initials R.K.B. In her top drawer was a handkerchief just like this, one that Rhett Butler had lent her only yesterday to wrap about the stems of wild flowers they had picked.”

Mitchell’s prejudice against blond hair is glaringly obvious. There is something wrong with every blond in the book. Either they are weak and doomed like Ashley, or pathetic and fatuous like his sisters, the “washed-out Wilkes girls,” or else they are social inferiors—poor white trash like Emmie Slattery, “the dirty tow- headed slut,” or simply low class like Will Benteen, who had “the sallow malarial face of the south Georgia Cracker, pale pinkish hair and washed-out blue eyes....”

Scarlett’s youngest sister, the fragile, wishy-washy Carreen, is not even described until chapter thirty. It’s as if Mitchell either forgot to describe her earlier, or was putting it off as long as possible. When we finally get a good look at her, we learn that she, too, has the mark of Cain. “The day came when his pale blue eyes, perfectly cognizant of his surroundings, fell upon Carreen sitting beside him, telling her rosary beads, the morning sun shining through her fair hair.”

Gerald O’Hara, who is sixty when the story opens, already has white hair when we meet him. There are several references to his “high color” and blue eyes, so he probably was blond, since one of his daughters is, but Mitchell never says—perhaps because he’s one of the good guys.

Her aversion to blonds extends gratuitously and sometimes comically to very minor characters. Seeing the Atlanta belle Maybelle Merriwether in an apple-green dress at the bazaar, Scarlett thinks: “That green is just my color and it would make my eyes look—Why will blondes try to wear that color? Her skin looks as green as an old cheese.”

Mitchell sees to it that blonds don’t have more fun. The most tragic figure in the book is Cathleen Clavert, daughter of a Clayton County planter, who is introduced in the barbecue scene as a “dashing blonde.”

Cathleen’s dramatic purpose in this early scene is to tell Scarlett the gossip about Rhett’s Charleston scandal. That done, she vanishes from the book until chapter twenty-nine, when she turns up at war-ravaged Tara to tell Scarlett and Melanie that she is going to marry Mr. Hilton, the Calverts’ Yankee overseer.

“Her sidesaddle was strapped on as sorry a mule as Scarlett had ever seen, a flop-eared lame brute, and Cathleen was almost as sorry looking as the animal she rode. Her dress was of faded gingham of the type once worn only by house servants, and her sunbonnet was secured under her chin by a piece of twine.”

Scarlett and Melanie can’t believe the dashing Cathleen could sink so low, but worse is still to come. When we see her for the last time at Gerald’s funeral, her degeneration is complete. She has one rotten life, and she lives it as a blonde.

“Cathleen Calvert Hilton stood alone...her faded sunbonnet hiding her bowed face. Scarlett saw with amazement that her percale dress had grease spots on it and her hands were freckled and unclean. There were even black crescents under her fingernails. There was nothing of quality folks about Cathleen now. She looked Cracker, even worse. She looked poor white, shiftless, slovenly, trifling.”

Margaret Mitchell’s aversion to blond hair is a class thing, and every Southerner understands. Blondness reminds us of hillbillies. The coastal plain is good, the mountains are bad. The Tidewater is brahmin, Appalachia is untouchable. After all, where were the aristocratic plantations located? Not on some dirty old blond hill.

The next time you hear someone hold forth about “the Anglo-Saxon South,” refer them to Katherine Anne Porter’s Old Mortality: “First, a beauty must be tall; whatever color the eyes, the hair must be dark, the darker the better....’’

• • •

If you are wondering what I think of Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett, wonder no more. Four newspapers asked me to review it, but I turned them all down. To my way of thinking, writing a sequel to a dead author’s novel is the first cousin of plagiarism, and I refuse to read it.

I did review two other Gone With the Wind spin-offs that say much about which side really won the Civil War.

Scarlett Greene by Barbara Ucko is about a Wisconsin couple sunk in a terminal South-toward-home complex. He a timid English major with a yearning for decadence brought on by his Faulkner studies; she a vague malkin whose countless rereadings of Gone With the Wind have so loosened her grip on reality that she can do little except quote verbatim page after page of Scarlett-Rhett dialogue.

They meet in the liberal mecca of the University of Wisconsin. Recognizing each other’s fake Southern accents, they realize they are made for each other and decide to get married. They move to a small Georgia town where he teaches high school English, and she produces three children named Scarlett, Melanie, and Leslie before taking to her bed of pain for a career of ladylike ailing.

Intellectual teenager Scarlett is the unpaid drudge in this webby household. While Mama languishes in bed humming “Tara’s Theme,” Scarlett cooks, cleans, and—to make sure she will never be hungry again—eats. Longing for chivalry but finding instead the sexual revolution, the fat but sensitive Scarlett suffers rejection by one stoned draft dodger after another until she moves up North and has an illegitimate baby by a black man. Presumably this symbolizes a break with her past.

Much worse, in fact, unbelievable, is The Blue Bicycle by Regine Deforges, a French novel that borrowed so heavily from the original opus that the Margaret Mitchell Estate sued and won.

The story opens on September 1, 1939, at Montillac, the beloved vineyard of Pierre Delmas, a self-made man married to the aristocratic Isabelle de Montpleynet. They have three daughters; Sabine, Lea, and Laure, all raised by bossy Nanny Ruth. The middle daughter, Lea, is her father’s favorite.

Hearing that Laurent d’Argilat, scion of the neighboring vineyard, Roches-Blanches, is going to marry his cousin Camille, Lea rushes off to find her father to ask him if it’s true.

It just so happens that Papa has spent the day at Roches-Blanches talking about the impending Nazi invasion of Poland.

“War! War!” Lea cuts in passionately. “I’m fed up with hearing about war.”

When Papa verifies the gossip about Laurent and Camille, Lea decides to lay siege to her beloved at the Roches-Blanches garden party the next day.

There Lea meets her hated rival. “Camille was much too ugly for Laurent,” she thinks. “How boring it must be to live with someone like her, with her delicate health and her meek ways.”

Lea lures Laurent into the greenhouse and confesses her love for him, but he tells her that he must marry Camille because, “We belong to an old family, we’re worn out, we need peace and quiet.” Furious, Lea kicks a flowerpot and storms out.

In the woods where she goes to calm down she sees “a man leaning against a tree who was watching her with an amused smile.”

“Anger becomes you, my beauty,” he says. His name is François Tavernier. A gunrunner for the French government, he mocks the impregnability of the Maginot Line and predicts defeat. “But don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” he tells her.

War breaks out and Laurent and Camille marry. To spite them, Lea gets engaged to Camille’s shy brother, Claude, but just before the wedding she comes down with measles and Claude goes off to training camp where he is accidentally killed during a weapons demonstration.

Dressed in mourning, Lea goes with Camille to Paris to live with a pair of dotty maiden aunts who are shocked when François Tavernier reappears and Lea goes dancing with him. Soon she is the belle of wartime Paris, but then....

“The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!”

Lea must get back home to Montillac, but she has promised Laurent to look after pregnant Camille, so Francois Tavernier steals a car for them and Lea makes her way back south with the writhing Camille and an hysterical maid.

Although we are told over and over that Lea is strong, the Lea we are shown is merely a woman with an exceedingly grumpy disposition whose alleged strength takes the form of voracity at the table and in bed. Her actions have the eery affectlessness of a zonked sex slave; after tussling in the hay with a strapping servant, “She buttoned up her blouse and fell asleep until evening, when she was awakened by the dinner bell.”

To signal her lubricious intentions to men, “She played with her lower lip, twisting it between thumb and forefinger,” a gesture straight out of Hustler. Her nanny deplores her strange habit of “getting up in the middle of the night to look at the moon, with her dog. Her mother is at the end of her tether.” (Incidentally, no writer with a good ear would put mother at the end of her tether after mentioning a dog.)

Maybe it’s the translation. I hope so, because if Régine Deforges really writes this badly, it’s only a matter of time before the Académie Française shoots out her kneecaps. Harlequin-Romance sentences abound (“She felt a strange new feeling welling up in her”); the dialogue is unbelievably trite (“This is madness!”); 1940s French characters use 1980s American buzzwords (“You like that little wimp?” “We love the same things, the same books, the same lifestyle”).

But it is Francois Tavernier who gets the worst line in the book. His parting words to Lea: “Regretfully, I must take leave of you now.”

What intrigues me about this novel is that Régine Deforges actually names Margaret Mitchell on the acknowledgments page. She may have done it simply for legal reasons, or it may be just another manifestation of the utter lack of humor she displays throughout the book.

Or it may indicate her subconscious understanding of what is happening.

The Gone With the Wind craze will continue. There will be sequel after sequel and spin-off after spin-off, not because readers secretly glory in its “racism,” as the Left believes, but because Gone With the Wind is more than just a novel. It’s a pantheon of timeless divinities and demigods that the human spirit craves but cannot find in the failed religions of the modern world.

Scarlett is Isis, Astarte, Venus, Helen of Troy; Melanie is Minerva, Diana, Cornelia; Rhett is Hector, Achilles, Odysseus; Ashley is chaste Hypolytus and beset Orestes; and the Tarleton twins are Castor and Pollux.

Catholics got something similar to this from the lives of the saints, but Protestants have been completely deprived of a humanized pantheon. Six thousand years from now, Gone With the Wind will be The Yankiad and Margaret Mitchell will be Homer.

Who said we lost?