Recently America celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) and the subsequent mini-series made from it (1977). Undoubtedly, Haley’s historically based account of his ancestors transformed the way whites and blacks understood the legacy of slavery in the United States. However, ten years prior to the publication of Roots, Margaret Walker published Jubilee (1966), a historical novel recounting the story of her own family’s survival and emancipation from slavery. Few people discuss Jubilee outside of scholarly circles these days, but during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Walker’s neo-slave narrative was heralded as a novel to rival Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).  .:read more:.

Also, Walker was already a star on the poetry scene. He was a graduate of prestigious programs at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. Walker won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1942 for her poetry collection For My People. She was clearly an influential writer even before the publication of Jubilee. However, today, Walker’s work remains curiously absent from many course syllabi and conference discussions. Although Haley’s Roots novel and miniseries somewhat usurped Jubilee’s public commentary on the subject of race in America, the fact remains that Jubilee is a must-read for anyone interested in the convergence of race and gender in both the Antebellum and Reconstruction South.

Jubilee is the story of Walker's great-grandmother Elvira Dozier Ware, a biracial slave woman held captive on a Georgia plantation. Vyry, short for Elvira, is the daughter of Sis Hetta, who dies from complications during childbirth. After the death of her mother, Vyry is trained to work in the big house for Big Missy. Big Missy resents Vyry’s presence in the house because Vyry is the illegitimate child of her husband, Marse John Dutton. Mammy Sukey and Aunt Sally serve as surrogate mothers for the now orphaned Vyry. These women prepare her for her life as a slave woman. They raise her to be quality, to have standards and decency. Vyry is soon orphaned again when Mammy Sukey dies from the plague and Aunt Sally is sold. The novel traces Vyry’s experiences as a young slave woman in Georgia to her experiences as an emancipated woman in Alabama. We witness her falling in love with Randall Ware, a free black man; her rise from insignificant house aide to head cook; her compassion for her enslavers; her struggle to survive during and after the Civil War; and her determination to make a better life with her second husband, Innis Brown, and her three children.

Walker writes a novel that is both slave narrative and bildungsroman. Vyry comes of age just as a new America is burgeoning. She embraces liberty; she is not overwhelmed by bitterness. Instead, Vyry is the model for an American humanism that would allow former slaves and former oppressors to coexist. However, Walker is no idealist; her writings are firmly grounded in a Southern realism that articulates the seeming contradictions of gentility and racial hatred implicit in Southern culture. Also, Walker’s telling of her great-grandmother’s story makes slavery real for us; we see these characters as real human beings and not artifacts of a mythic memory. Vyry and other women like her existed, struggled, persevered, and survived the meaningless suffering of the peculiar institution of slavery. Surely, there is room for the story of Jubilee and Vyry alongside the story of Roots and Kunta Kinte. Both works deserve to be a part of our joyful noise.

center stage magazine

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