Jubilee

by Walker, Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780395924952
• ISBN10: 0395924952
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-21
• Publisher: Mariner Companies, Inc.

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.

Author Biography

Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was one of America's most popular and respected African-American writers and scholars. She first gained national recognition with the 1942 poetry collection For My People, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel Jubilee, which became a national bestseller. Among the most formidable literary voices to emerge in the twentieth century, she will be remembered as one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage.

Table of Contents

I. Sis Hetta's Child---The Ante-Bellum Years
Death is a mystery that only the squinch owl knows	3	(15)
Along the Big Road in Egypt's land . . .	18	(20)
``Flee as a bird to your mountain''	38	(17)
Brother Zeke: ``I am a poor way-faring stranger''	55	(3)
Grimes: ``Cotton is king!''	58	(12)
Marse John's dinner party	70	(11)
Cook in the Big House	81	(9)
Randall Ware	90	(7)
Springtime is sallet time	97	(5)
Wedding in the Big House and love in the cornfields	102	(16)
Fourth of July celebration	118	(9)
She has the letter ``R'' branded on her face	127	(2)
Harvest time	129	(8)
``There's a star in the East on Christmas morn''	137	(11)
Freedom is a secret word I dare not say	148	(8)
Get a man to buy my time out	156	(8)
Put on men's clothes and a man's old cap	164	(7)
Seventy-five lashes on her naked back	171	(6)
II. ``Mine eyes have seen the Glory''---The Civil War Years
``John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave''	177	(7)
This pot is boiling over and the fat is in the fire	184	(4)
The Vernal Equinox of 1861	188	(5)
Don't make them come and get you! Volunteer!	193	(6)
We'll be back home before breakfast is over	199	(9)
They made us sing ``Dixie''	208	(5)
Chickamauga---River of Death	213	(9)
Can you forge?	222	(6)
Down with the shackle and up with the star!	228	(3)
Shall be forever free	231	(10)
Mister Lincoln is our Moses	241	(4)
Action at Olustee	245	(5)
Pensive on her dead gazing	250	(3)
Confederate specie	253	(6)
General Sherman is in Georgia	259	(2)
What's that I smell?	261	(7)
``We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree''	268	(8)
A noise like thunder...a cloud of dust	276	(11)
The honor of this house...	287	(5)
My name is Innis Brown	292	(6)
What you waiting here for?	298	(5)
One more Christmas on the old home place	303	(12)
III. ``Forty years in the wilderness''---Reconstruction and Reaction
Two weeks in the wagon	315	(6)
Bound for Alabama	321	(6)
Wiregrass country in the Alabama bottoms	327	(15)
Forty acres and a mule	342	(10)
New land and higher ground	352	(11)
Brand-new house with windows from the mill	363	(15)
Bad luck and hard times	378	(11)
Ku Klux Klan don't like no Koons	389	(7)
Keep the niggers from the polls and we'll return to White Home Rule!	396	(2)
Burned out and running for our lives twice in a row	398	(15)
Don't look like free schools and land reform is ever coming	413	(5)
Where's the money coming from?	418	(7)
I reckon I can be a granny in a pinch	425	(11)
We got new neighbors now	436	(6)
Freedom don't mean nothing, him allus driving and whupping me to work!	442	(18)
The blackest man I ever did see	460	(10)
What will happen to poor colored folks now?	470	(20)
Howdy and goodbye, honey-boy!	490