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How I Wrote "Jubilee. " Margaret Walker. New York: The Feminist Press, 1990. 153 pp.
One of the best books that I read in my youth was a novel called Jubilee. I picked it up one summer's day in the town library; I remember the cover said "The 1,000,000 copy bestseller with all the sweep and grandeur of Gone With the Wind]" Having never read Gone With the Wind I was not convinced, but I did like the cover, showing a civil war background overlaid by a proud black women. I began to read and was immediately absorbed by well-researched historical fiction. I loved this novel so much that I never wanted it to end, and, unlike the majority of the novels I have read in my youth, I remember it to this day. Jubilee, I now know, is an antidote to Gone With the Wind. When I saw that the Feminist Press had published How I Wrote Jubilee by Margaret Walker, I immediately wanted to know more about her.
How does a black woman academic come to write a popular novel that is both a best-seller and a long-seller? According to Walker, she has been working on it all of her life:
Long before Jubilee had a name, I was living with it and imagining its reality. Its genesis coincides with my childhood, its development grows out of a welter of raw experiences and careful research, and its final form emerged exactly one hundred years after its major events took place.
Walker wrote Jubilee from the stories that her grandmother told her about her great-grandmother, and from years of research in Southern archives. It is the story of the slave Vyry, with "all the sweep and grandeur" of a Southern Romance, but it is written from the slaves' point of view, and it is written with historical veracity.
Walker officially started the novel in...