Chapters 1-12 Summary

This novel is written as though it is a journal discovered recently after being written in the years after the Civil War and lost for many decades. The novel is presented as being fact. The novel is a parody of the Margaret Mitchell novel, Gone with the Wind.

In Chapter 1, Cynara begins her journal on her twenty-eighth birthday by looking back on the circumstances of her birth. Cynara tells the journal how she was born into slavery, the daughter of Planter, Gerald O'Hara owner of Tara, and the O'Hara family mammy.

In Chapter 2, Cynara recalls the humiliation of the slave market and how it contrasts starkly with her current situation, living in her own home in Atlanta. Cynara laments the fact that slavery is no longer legal, but she remains a concubine.

In Chapter 3, Cynara recalls how she was called Cinnamon...