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A review by actually_juliette
Jubilee by Margaret Walker
5.0
I first read this book for US History I, and, although I only read the book that one time, even now, twelve years after that class, I still remember certain scenes vividly. Let that be a caution and an enticement: the story of Vyry will haunt you.
The back of the book compares Vyry to Scarlet O'Hara, but she's so much more of a Civil War heroine than that boring, little priss ever could be. I'll let Vyry give her summary:
The book spans the antebellum, Civil War, and "Reconstruction" South. It was published in 1966, during the Civil Rights movement, by the real Vyry's great-granddaughter. (Walker was told stories of her great-grandmother by her grandmother, and she wove those stories with her own research to write this book.) Of course, it comes from a place of respect, but I would argue that it is well nigh impossible to translate the horror of slavery into words. Walker tries, though, and she brings her grandmother, one woman in the swath of American history, to life.
The back of the book compares Vyry to Scarlet O'Hara, but she's so much more of a Civil War heroine than that boring, little priss ever could be. I'll let Vyry give her summary:
"I'm a colored woman."
"You trying to joke with me. You whiter skinned than I is."
"I can't help it if I am. My Maw was sho a black woman."
"Your mother was black?"
"She sho was. And I don't reckon I haste tell you what my daddy was?"
"A real light skinned colored man?"
"No ma'am, he wasn't. He was my white marster, that's who he was. He was my mother's marster and my marster too, and I was a slave on his plantation till Surrender and the soldiers come and declared us free. Of course now, he never did own me for his child and I wasn't nothing but his piece of property to work and slave for him, but I sho didn't cost him nothing, that is as a price on the slave market, cause he never had to buy me -- I was always his."
(p. 431)
The book spans the antebellum, Civil War, and "Reconstruction" South. It was published in 1966, during the Civil Rights movement, by the real Vyry's great-granddaughter. (Walker was told stories of her great-grandmother by her grandmother, and she wove those stories with her own research to write this book.) Of course, it comes from a place of respect, but I would argue that it is well nigh impossible to translate the horror of slavery into words. Walker tries, though, and she brings her grandmother, one woman in the swath of American history, to life.