former slaves, told her as bedtime stories during
her childhood. In her dedication, Walker wrote
that Jubilee was dedicated “to the memory of my
grandmothers: my maternal great-grandmother
Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, whose story this
is; my maternal grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier,
who told me this story; and my paternal grand-
mother, Margaret Walker.”
Jubilee follows Vyry’s life from her childhood
during the antebellum years to the early Recon-
struction period. Vyry, the daughter of a white
plantation owner, John Dutton, and his black slave
mistress, Sis Hatte, is two years old when the novel
begins. Her mother, on her deathbed, asks to see
her last child. After Hatte’s death, Mrs. Dutton
summons the child to the Big House to serve as
chambermaid for her white half sister and play-
mate, Lillian, who looks like Vyry’s identical twin,
as retribution for her husband’s infidelity. (Hatte
produced 15 slave children for Mr. Dutton.) Vyry’s
rite of passage into her role as slave comes early in
her experience, when Mrs. Dutton throws the con-
tents of Lillian’s chamber pot into her face because
Vyry forgot to empty it one morning. Following
the death of her mother and surrogate mothers
and the sale of Aunt Sally, a grieving Vyry becomes
the head cook in the Big House by default. Al-
though she attempts to run away with her children
and Randall Ware, her husband, a free black, on
the Underground Railroad, Vyry is caught, pun-
ished, and returned to slavery.
Emancipation means freedom, but Vyry, a
woman of commitment and the highest morals,
remains on the plantation to be near Lillian, whose
failing physical and mental health require her con-
tinued support. Vyry also stays because she is con-
vinced Randall Ware will return for the family he
left behind when Vyry was captured and returned
to slavery. Although she remains faithful and waits
to reunite with Ware, Vyry, who, like the heroine
Clotel in WILLIAM WELLS BROWN’s novel Clotel, Or
the President’s Daughter (1854), is white enough to
pass but does not choose to do so, marries Innis
Brown, “a maroon”; moves with him and the chil-
dren to Alabama; and builds a new life in freedom
together as a family and as farmers. “And in their
joy to be building a home of their own, everything
seemed possible” (267).
Walker draws Vyry’s and Innis’s lives against the
history of blacks in America during the historical
period she covers. She provides credible insights
into life on the plantation, the separation of black
families during slavery, the Civil War, and black
quests for meaning, political freedom, education,
and economic stability during this period. The
strength of the novel, most critics agree, is Walker’s
treatment and characterization of Vyry who, ac-
cording to Bernard Bell, is one of “the most mem-
orable women in contemporary Afro-American
fiction” (287). Further describing her as a “pillar
of Christian faith and human dignity,” Bell con-
cludes that Vyry “commands our respect first as an
individual and then as a symbol of the nineteenth
century black womanhood” (287).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradi-
tion. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1987.
Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. New York: Bantam Books,
1966.
Wilfred D. SamuelsJuneteenth Ralph Ellison (1999)
Although RALPH ELLISON had been working on
Juneteenth, his second novel, since the completion
of INVISIBLE MAN (1952), it was published posthu-
mously, in 1999. In 1967, the original manuscript
of Juneteenth—then more than 300 pages in length
with several of the chapters already published
as short stories or excerpts—was destroyed in a
house fire. By the time of Ellison’s death in 1994,
eight chapters had appeared in print. Although
in the work Ellison emphasizes many of the same
themes found in his monumental, classic first
novel, he was not satisfied with Juneteenth’s devel-
opment during the many years he spent working
on it. However, the executor of his estate, critic
and scholar John Callahan, finally published the
work as a novel. Editing the existing sections and292 Juneteenth