Jubilee
Margaret Walker, 1966
Houghton Miflin Harcourt
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780395924952
Summary
Here is the classic—and true—story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter.
The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander
• Birth—July 6, 1915
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Death—November 30, 1998
• Where—Chicago, Illinois
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University; M.A., Ph.D.,
University of Iowa
Margaret Walker was an African-American poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her best-known poems is "For My People."
Walker was born to Sigismund C. Walker, a Methodist minister and Marion Dozier Walker, who helped their daughter by teaching her philosophy and poetry as a child. Her family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young girl. She attended school there, including several years of college before she moved north.
In 1935, Margaret Walker received her Bachelors of Arts Degree from Northwestern University and in 1936 she began work with the Federal Writers' Project under the Works Progress Administration. In 1942, she received her master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1965, she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D.
Walker married Firnist Alexander in 1943; they had four children and lived in Mississippi. Walker was a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University (1949 to 1979). In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center) at the school. She went on to serve as the Institute's director.
Among Walker's more popular works are her poem "For My People," which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1942 under the judgeship of editor Stephen Vincent Benet, and her 1966 novel Jubilee, which also received critical acclaim. The book was based on her own grandmother's life as a slave.
In 1975, Walker released three albums of poetry on Folkways Records—Margaret Walker Alexander Reads Langston Hughes, P.L. Dunbar, J.W. Johnson, Margaret Walker Reads Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes, and The Poetry of Margaret Walker.
In 1988, she sued Alex Haley, claiming his novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family had violated Jubilee's copyright. The case was dismissed. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Nobel for helpful customer reviews.)
[With] a tough spirit that insists upon survival...Vyry becomes one of the memorable women of contemporary fiction.... The publishers tell us that Jubilee is "based on the true life story of the author's great-grandmother," and that for the first time such a story "is told from the Negro point of view...." What is of first importance is not the race of its author or the sources of its inspiration but its ring of artistic truth.... In it's best episodes, and in Vyry, Juliee choronicles the triumphs of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages.
Wilma Dykeman - New York Times
Do yourself a favor by picking up Jubilee.
Chicago Tribune
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Jubilee:
1. Upon her mother's death (at the heart-breaking age of 29, with 15 children), Vyry is sent to work in the plantation household where she encounters the cruelty of Missy Salina. Why is Vyry treated with such viciousness? Even more important, how does Vyry sustain herself through the brutality—what enables her to survive? How does Lillian treat Vyry and how does her treatment change over time?
2. What other kinds of inhuman punishments does Vyry witness?
3. Aside from the art of cooking, what else does Aunt Sally teach Vyry that will stand her in good stead in life?
4. Prior to the 1960's most accounts of slavery were written by and seen through the perspectives of white Anglo-Americans. Jubilee is one of the first books to break from that traditional telling. Talk how reading the novel through African-American eyes makes a difference in what we learn about the South's antebellum and reconstruction eras.
5. Talk about the role that faith plays in Vyry's life. How does it prevent her from falling into bitterness and despair?
6. Discuss Vyry's dream about a door to freedom and the man who will not give her the key? Symbolically, what might the dream represent?
7. Why does Vyry remain to help Miss Lillian after the war is over? What keeps her on the plantation when other former slaves, May Liza, Caline and Jim, leave?
8. What was the irony of the long hoped for Emancipation? In what ways were the Reconstruction years more frightening, perhaps even more painful, than the years of slavery? What about Jim's observation that freedom seems to do them no good when all they do is work with little to show for their efforts?
9. Some reviewers felt it was unfortunate that Walker drew on stereotypes to move the story forward. On the other hand, some of the characters, while not fully developed, represent an aggregate of historic individuals: cruel overseer, poor whites, angry black men, spoiled masters, and so on. Point out which characters seem to represent types...and which "types."
10. How do you feel about Vyry's choice in the end between Innis and Randall Ware?
11. In what way can this book be seen as a "coming-of-age" story for Vyry—a story in which a young person matures and comes to take her place in the adult world?
12. Jubilee is a true account of Margaret Walker's great-grandmother. Talk about what you've learned as a result of reading this work? Have you gained a deeper, more personal understanding of slavery...or the politics of Reconstruction, or the activities of the Ku Klux Klan?
13. What other books have you read about this time period? Beloved by Toni Morrison? Roots by Alex Haley, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe? Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell? How does Jubilee compare with any of these works?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)