Jubilee
Uploaded by toocute03 on Dec 07, 2006
Jubilee
Jubilee is a historical novel written by Margaret Walker. Mrs. Walker’s full name was Margaret Walker Alexander and she was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1915. As a child, her mother and father helped start her interest literature by teaching her philosophy and poetry. Margaret Walker's novel Jubilee, the 1966 winner of Houghton Mifflin's Literary Fellowship Award, is one of the first novels to present the nineteenth-century African American historical experience in the South from a black and female point of view. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Walker's great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, who was born a slave in Dawson in Terrell County and lived through Reconstruction in southwest Georgia. It is based on stories told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. Walker also learned much about the life of her great-grandfather, a free man from birth. While on a speaking engagement in nearby Albany in 1947, Walker visited Dawson, where she found a man who had known her great-grandfather, Randall Ware, who worked as a blacksmith and operated a grist mill, which she was able to visit. Walker based the description of the Dutton plantation, where most of her story is set, on an antebellum house that she discovered while visiting Bainbridge. Walker's narrative is divided equally into sections on the antebellum era, the Civil War (1861-65), and Reconstruction. Each section contains eighteen to twenty-two chapters. Jubilee draws on both history and folk traditions. The treatment of the slaves is based on numerous slave narratives Walker researched in archives and libraries in Georgia, North Carolina, and the National Archives. Jubilee moves its heroine, Vyry, from the slave cabin to the "Big House," and from slavery to freedom. The Civil War section of Jubilee traces the battles, historically, from Tennessee to Sherman's march through Georgia. The book's final section begins with the war's end. It does not bring immediate freedom for Vyry. The ending of Jubilee suggests a connection between the events the novel has described during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The narrative ends on a train bound for Selma.