On my Bookshelf: Jubilee

“ … I’m gwine teach my childrens to hate nobody, don’t care what they does. I ain’t gwine teach my childrens hate cause hate ain’t nothing but rank poison.”

Jubilee, written by historian Margaret Walker and published in 1966 has often been likened to Gone With the Wind. The summary on my pocketbook version calls Vyry, the novel’s main character “a Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O’Hara”. And the comparison does seem obvious. Both characters are female, both live through and survive the Civil War, and both show incredible resilience and resourcefulness. But there’s also a few crucial differences. In contrast to Scarlett, Vyry (as all other characters in the book) is based on a real person – Margaret Walker’s great-grandmother, while the characters in Gone With the Wind are all fictional. Also, Margaret Walker is a historian who first wrote Jubilee for her Ph.D.

            And then there is of course the crucial issue of race. Gone With the Wind focuses almost exclusively on white characters, and the African American characters that do feature in the novel, are portrayed in problematic ways, as I have noted before. Jubilee, on the other hand, focuses mostly on Vyry and how she survives being a slave in the house of her own father, the Civil War, and Reconstruction with all its hope and horrors (including the burning down of her house by the Ku Klux Klan and the miscarriage this causes). Jubilee, however, also shows the enthusiasm for the War, and its horrible effects, on Vyry’s owners.
            Thus, Jubilee is a riveting, and more rounded, view than Gone With the Wind. Especially if the reader reminds himself time and again that what he is reading is not merely a novel, but the history of someone’s life even if it is presented as a novel. This is a book I would love to see brought to the big screen. And maybe, if 12 Years a Slave is an indication for a new interest in real person’s lives under slavery and after the Civil War, I may yet get to see it.