Born: 7 July 1915, United States
Died: 30 November 1998
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander
The following is shared from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which allows the use of protected materials for noncommercial educational purposes.
Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee, published in 1966, is one of the first novels to present the nineteenth-century African American historical experience in the South from a Black and female point of view.
The winner of Houghton Mifflin’s Literary Fellowship Award, the novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Walker’s great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, who was born enslaved in Dawson in Terrell County and lived through Reconstruction in southwest Georgia. It is based on stories told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. Walker herself was not a Georgian by birth. Born in Alabama, she spent most of her teaching career in Mississippi and earned her doctorate at the University of Iowa, where she wrote most of Jubilee, which served as her dissertation.
Walker also learned much about the life of her great-grandfather, a free man from birth. While on a speaking engagement in nearby Albany in 1947, Walker visited Dawson, where she found a man who had known her great-grandfather Randall Ware, who worked as a blacksmith and operated a gristmill, which she was able to visit. Walker based the description of the Dutton plantation, where most of her story is set, on an antebellum house that she discovered while visiting Bainbridge.
Walker’s narrative is divided equally into sections on the antebellum era, the Civil War (1861-65), and Reconstruction. Each section contains eighteen to twenty-two chapters. Despite the lengthy narrative passages and the demands on the reader imposed by the various dialects, Jubilee moves its heroine, Vyry, from the slave cabin to the “Big House,” and from slavery to freedom.