[In the following chapter from her full-length study of Jubilee, Carmichael discusses recent critical re-evaluation of the novel and a brief history of critical trends in relation to Walker's work.]

Our birth and death are easy hours, like sleep
and food and drink. The struggle staggers us
for bread, for pride, for simple dignity.
And this is more than fighting to exist;
more than revolt and war and human odds.
There is a journey from the me to you.
There is a journey from the you to me.
A union of the two strange worlds must be.
Ours is a struggle from a too-warm bed;
too cluttered with a patience full of sleep.
Out of this blackness we must struggle forth;
from want of bread, of pride, of dignity.
Struggle between the morning and the night.
This marks our years; this settles, too, our plight.

—Margaret Walker, “The Struggle Staggers Us”

Whether Margaret Walker is writing poetry or prose, she evokes the bitterness and despair of her people and calls for a “union of the two worlds,” black and white. Within this ethos, she writes specifically of black women in America, a story of subjugation and marginalization, but also, in her view, a story of courage, perseverance, and personal triumph. This dramatic story, which is the main focus of Jubilee, has only lately begun to receive its due as an early and bold reconsideration of the roles women may play in both history and fiction.

The portion of Vyry's story that is a slave narrative, for example, reflects, like countless others that have been recorded and analyzed, the potential of the slave system to abuse and destroy the female self, but also the will and personal strength of individual women to overcome the horrors of the system. As William Andrews has written, as early as the story of Mary Prince, “female slave narrators portrayed the enslaved black woman as a person of near-indomitable dedication to the highest principles of human dignity and individual freedom.”¹ This is one source of a tradition of writing by later generations. In From Mammies to Militants (1982), Trudier Harris surveys stories by black Americans about a range of black women in literature, observing that “their paradigmatic effort is to hold on to an essence of self against forces that would stereotype them, force them to conform, or dehumanize them.”² Harris demonstrates this point with a roll call of black women in American literature who suffer under the weight of prejudice and domination: William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) is barely able to realize her self, Charles Waddell Chesnutt's Rena Walden (1900) lives a life of divided selves, Nella Larsen's Helga Crane (1928) adjusts to others' conception of self, Zora Neale Hurston's Janie (1937) battles stereotypes to achieve what her self wanted, and Toni Morrison's Sula (1974) succumbs when expressions of her self are denied.³ Margaret Walker's Vyry (1966) is not on Harris's roll. Perhaps this is because, though Vyry's self is repeatedly denied in the abuses she endures at the hands of the slave mistress and the slave driver (while her father, the slave master, watches benignly), Vyry's self-will and self-giving allow her to dream of and to find fleeting moments of freedom and self-discovery.

Research shows how much Walker was ahead of her time in her portrait of Vyry. She portrays not only the hypocrisy and inhumanity of slavery in the South—at a time when it was still often sentimentalized—she also accurately depicts what the slaves did, in bondage and later in freedom, to gain control over their own lives and culture, to found families that have lasted through the generations, and to bequeath essential values to their descendants. The nineteenth-century actress Fanny Kemble, who married Philadelphian Pierce Butler and lived with him for a time on his family's Georgia plantation on St. Simon's, had, of course, reported in her journal about slave life much of what Walker presents in Jubilee. According to Kemble, the house servants sometimes fared much worse than the field hands and lived in torment, for they had little chance to avoid the constant observation and wrath of their superiors.⁴ Eugene Genovese, reporting from Kemble's Journal, wrote that white women became the aggressors more often than did their husbands, in part because of sexual jealousies and frustrations.⁵ Kemble's fate for writing these truths in the nineteenth century, at least in terms of her marriage to Butler and the raising of her daughters, was not unlike the fates of the women about whom she wrote; she was rebuked and legally separated from her children. Even her writing was for many years marginalized, her observations supplanted by a quaint and stereotypical view of the life she had tried to portray truthfully. By and large, then, it was not until Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), eight years after Walker's novel, that what black families and black historians had long known began to be part of even general academic knowledge in the United States.

In his chapter on “Life in the Big House,” Genovese draws on personal journals and firsthand accounts from Norman R. Yetman's Life under the “Peculiar Institution” (1970) to show how house servants really lived on slave plantations. Mingo White, an ex-slave from Alabama, recalls that his mother served as maid to the master's daughter, cooked for all the field hands, carded and spun four cuts of thread a day, and then washed. There were 144 threads to cut. If his mother did not get all this done, she got fifty lashes that night. Jacob Branch of Texas reports that every washday, old Missy gave his mama a beating, because she never thought that the washing was good enough.⁶ Genovese concludes from Frederick Law Olmsted's A Journey in the Seaboard States in the Years 1853-1854 that the black and white women of the big house needed each other and that they lived as part of a single family, although by no means always a happy, peaceful, or loving one.⁷

Interestingly, initial reviewers of Jubilee in both southern and northern publications did not react perceptively or sympathetically to Walker's deconstructive treatment of the legend of the beneficent plantation, the kindly slave owner, and the paternalistic peculiar institution. What they did write, however, were general descriptions of Vyry's strong will to survive. Sheila Maroney in Crisis magazine wrote that “it was Vyry's indomitable spirit and dignity and pride that made her a woman.”⁸ Lester Davis, in Freedomways, credited Walker with presenting Vyry as “a woman of exceptional moral and physical strength with an innate capacity for logical reasoning.”⁹ In the New York Times Book Review, Wilma Dykeman accused Big Missy Salina of wreaking revenge on Vyry for her loveless marriage and sexual humiliation. However, wrote Dykeman, “the girl has hidden resources, a tough spirit that insists upon survival.”¹⁰ Finally, Abraham Chapman, in the Saturday Review, saw Vyry as a slave “who distills out of her life … a hard realism, a fierce spiritual force and hope.”¹¹ From the writings of Genovese and the women and men after him who have documented the “world the slaves made,” we know much more now about such women with hidden resources and tough spirits, some of whom often, if not always, succeeded in surviving the constraints of slavery and the imposed poverty and vicious racism of the postemancipation period. Moreover, they left many legacies—material, spiritual, and anecdotal—to their daughters, granddaughters, and other kin.

Jeanne Noble, in her aptly titled Beautiful, also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters (1978), rightly perceived the importance and singularity of Walker's portrayal of Vyry: “What is unique about it is the view from the inner world of a black woman as written by a black woman … and it develops the character of Vyry as a model of female strength.”¹² Noble called on the reader to watch Vyry at work, and she cautioned the casual reader not to make the easy assumption that Vyry is in the tradition of all the frontier women of America. Noble countered that women did help settle the West, played a variety of roles, and even assumed masculine tasks, but that these roles were generally temporary and in consort with the social values of their times. The roles played by Vyry, Noble pointed out, were never intended to be temporary ones in America. “There never has been a time of settlement for black people,” she postulated, “when black women could assume any other role.”¹³

In From Mammies to Militants, Trudier Harris observed that “whether victims of sexual exploitation during slavery, or tragic mulattoes who tried to escape their blackness by passing, or extremely dark-skinned black women who suffered inter- and intra-racial prejudice, or matriarchs, or welfare recipients, or the new superblack women of the 1960s, black women have been treated as types.”¹⁴ Harris presented Maya Angelou's summaries of the easy evaluations and categorizations of black women in America: “Called Matriarch, Emasculator and Hot Momma. Sometimes Sister, Pretty Baby, Auntie, Mammy and Girl. Called Unwed Mother, Welfare Recipient and Inner City Consumer. The Black American Woman has had to admit that while nobody knew the troubles she saw, everybody, his brother and his dog, felt qualified to explain her, even to herself.” Angelou recognized—and Harris confirmed with the evidence of her wide reading—that the categories “leave little room for realistic individualistic treatment of black women.”¹⁵

Walker would agree. In an interview with Claudia Tate, Walker pulled out an unpublished manuscript that addressed Tate's question on images of black women in black American literature. Walker read some of it to Tate: “The image of black women in American literature has portrayed the black woman as she is seen in society, exploited because of her sex, her race, and her poverty. The black male writer has largely imitated his white counterparts, seeing all black characters and particularly females as lowest on the socioeconomic scale: as slaves or servants, as menial, marginal persons, evil, disreputable and powerless.”¹⁶ Walker pointed out that Leslie Fiedler's well-accepted book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) is a typical study that equates black with evil and the black woman as loose and amoral, while the blue-eyed blond woman is portrayed as virtuous and of virginal purity.

Among works that present black women with sympathy, Walker cited W. E. B. DuBois's Dark Princess (1928) and Sam Greenlee's Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969). In James Weldon Johnson's only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1955), Walker observed, the white woman is favored over the black woman. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, she said, did a little better; in general, “The positive view of women in Afro-American literature is only portrayed by black women.”¹⁷

Walker supported her argument by citing Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) as an early novel that creates a woman who is intelligent, attractive, human, and forceful in her personality.¹⁸ Harper was a poet, essayist, and novelist who was interested in the abolition movement, women's rights, and temperance. Iola Leroy is her only novel, once thought to be the first published by a black American (that distinction now belongs to Harriet Wilson's Our Nig). Iola Leroy is an account of an octoroon who refuses what would be very easy passage into white society, choosing instead to devote her energies to uplifting the black race. Walker referred to Harper's black woman as being very much like Harper herself, possessing strong moral character, an indomitable will, perseverance, and a determination to overcome all obstacles and handicaps. Walker further contended that Zora Neale Hurston, whom she knew personally, had created an immortal love story in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston's black couple, Janie and Teacake, Walker argued, demonstrate a love that is readily recognized by black women as typical of their affairs with black men. “Black women have received such cruel treatment in the literature,” Walker summarized. “Only when the author is a black woman does she [the black female character] have half a chance.”¹⁹

Gloria Naylor's discussion of community, class, and patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place (1982) affirms Walker's point of view, noting the significance of “the culture of sharing and nurturing in Brewster Place as one based on a black tradition in this country that harkens back to slavery.”²⁰ Naylor singles out several contemporary novels written by African Americans who depict female characters in mutual support of one another. Margaret Walker's Jubilee reminds us that “it was such values that allowed the ordinary slave to survive.”²¹ Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) share the common concerns of raising children and defending against sexism and racism, abuses inflicted on black women. “Although these women are independent,” Naylor argues, “it is an independence designed to fend off attack. Since the women have not chosen this independence, they prefer not to have it.” She elaborates, “In all of these novels, the women do not or cannot change their condition but learn to cope with their condition as best they can.”²²

Walker's Jubilee has the scope, by virtue of its historical sweep, to tell a complex story of degradation overcome and hardships surmounted. The first part, as slave narrative, portrays the cruel and ambitious tensions between the white masters, male and female, and the people they presume to own. The second part concerns a more subtle set of interactions between the white and black women who are left on the plantation as the white men leave to fight the Civil War. These interactions include the sometimes contradictory bonding of black and white women in the face of common hardships. As Minrose Gwin has argued, when white female control is stripped away, “this midsection of the saga becomes the black woman's ascendancy. Vyry moves from the frightened slave child who ducks behind corners to avoid Big Missy, to the mainstay of what is left of the white family. Her endurance is the thread which knits this section—and the whole novel—together into a rendering of the indomitability of the Afro-American heritage.”²³

Walker's portrayal of Vyry's successful application of her own inner strength contains another element that first reviewers of the novel, even sympathetic ones, missed. As critic Adrianne Baytop notes, “Walker allows Vyry to pass simultaneously from slavery to freedom and from girlhood to womanhood. Thus Walker frees her epic from the traditional male-oriented sense of the heroic, structuring her novel around Vyry … Vyry's first husband [a free and literate Negro], functions only in a supportive role to underscore Vyry's heroism.”²⁴ This heroism is not, however, as Eleanor Traylor observes, “the movement of an epic conqueror who requires an army. Vyry's is neither a sentimental journey nor romance but a continuous process of dissolution, absorption, conversion, and realignment.”²⁵

Given Walker's achievement, it is remarkable that Jubilee did not, when it appeared in 1966, receive more credit as a feminist and African Americanist reconstruction of both a type of the American novel and the history on which such novels had previously been based. As Charlotte Goodman points out in “From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Vyry's Kitchen” (1991), “Despite the current interest in fiction by black women writers, Jubilee has been far less frequently discussed even by feminist critics than, for example, the novels of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and a number of other contemporary black women writers.”²⁶

Temma Berg adds, “On the surface Jubilee looks like a conventional bestseller and therefore, politically inert, [but] it can be seen as a postmodern revision of a modernist text, which gives voice to what is seldom heard—the voice of an anti-hierarchical acceptance and dismissal of difference, the voice of the feminine.” Berg uses a Chodorow-Dinnerstein-Gilligan line of argument to demonstrate that “while men value separation, integrity, hierarchical ordering, and righteousness, women value interdependence, caring, collaboration, and responsibility toward others.” Berg argues, “If we apply this dialectic to [William Faulkner's 1936 novel] Absalom, Absalom! and Jubilee, we can see Walker's book as an affirmation of the feminine ‘voice’ in all its manifestations and as a wonderfully subversive reading (whether consciously or unconsciously) of the unequivocally masculine Absalom, Absalom!” She submits that “while a story of fathers and sons must end in despair, defeat, frustration, and hopeless self-hatred, when a story of mothers and daughters is told it is able to end with hope, joy, assurance of continuity, and an ethic of caring.”²⁷

In Render Me My Song: African-American Writers from Slavery to the Present (1990), Sandi Russell's contrasting views of Jubilee and Gone with the Wind also support such an argument. Russell writes that “by revising the stereotype of mammy and mulatta, Walker corrects the false myths that flourish in epic novels of the Civil War, and where a white writer like Mitchell sees humiliation and defeat, the black writer records triumph of Emancipation.”²⁸

Why, then, has Walker had to wait so long for credit for her achievement? Deborah E. McDowell's essay “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism” contends that “early theorists and practitioners of feminist literary criticism were largely white females who, wittingly or not, perpetrated against the Black woman writer the same exclusive practices they so vehemently decried in white male scholars.” “Seeing the experiences of white women,” McDowell argues, “particularly white middle-class women, as normative, white female scholars proceeded blindly to exclude the work of Black women writers from literary anthologies and critical studies.”²⁹ McDowell cites Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination (1976) as the most flagrant example of this kind of chauvinism. McDowell also points the finger at black scholars, most of whom are males, who have excised black women writers from the African American literary tradition. As an example, she cites Robert Stepto's From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979): Stepto omits the names of black women writers from the table of contents and gives a “two-page” discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. McDowell offers Robert Bone's The Negro Novel in America (1958) to demonstrate that author's “partisan and superficial” reading of Jessie Fauset's novels. Although David Littlejohn's book, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes (1966) praises black fiction since 1940, McDowell maintains that Littlejohn denigrates the work of Fauset and Nella Larsen. She concludes that “when Black women writers are neither ignored altogether nor merely given honorable mention, they are critically misunderstood and summarily dismissed.”³⁰

It is remarkable that anyone could assume that because Walker often expresses a genuine humanism and positive attitude, she is unaware of such difficulties. As a woman, Walker says, she has come through “the fires of hell” because she is black, poor, lives in America, and is determined both to be a creative artist and to maintain her inner integrity and instinctive need to be free.³¹ She has ample evidence to agree with the assessment of Barbara Smith that “any discussion of Afro-American writers can rightfully begin with the fact that most of the time we have been in this country we have been categorically denied not only literacy, but the most minimal possibility of a decent human life.” Smith uses Alice Walker's “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” to demonstrate this same notion of how the political, economic, and social restrictions of slavery and racism have historically stunted the creative lives of black women.³² Walker, of course, remembers well the racial injustices she experienced before being considered eligible for the Yale Younger Poets award. This is what she had to say to Kay Bonetti in 1991:

The first book For My People, I tried the Yale Younger Poets competition off and on about five years. Even when I wrote Stephen Vincent Benet and he encouraged me I wrote him in 1940 and the book was awarded in 1942. You see, it was rejected in 1940 and rejected in 1941, and I was not even going to send it in 1942, and he asked me about it. So then I sent it, and he immediately gave it the—but I learned that the publishers were not anxious to have a black woman published at Yale. I had not expected to find that kind of prejudice there. But I did discover there was strong prejudice and racism all over this country. I am like most black people who are honest and who want to achieve, you know what's out there and you strive to rise above it and overcome and achieve regardless.³³

Charlotte Goodman posits another reason that Jubilee has received so little critical attention: “The novel does not focus on sexism within the black community as the novels of other contemporary black women writers frequently do.” Furthermore, she postulates, “Margaret Walker's espousal of the doctrine of Christian humanism in Jubilee, her endorsement of the principles of nonviolence, and her affirmation of the bonds between black and white women may have antagonized the more militant writers of the seventies and eighties.” Nevertheless, Goodman argues, “Jubilee deserves to be much better known than it is at present, because Walker has succeeded in representing what no other American writer has represented with so much skill or authority.” She calls the work “a compelling picture of the community of black women during the Civil War period.”³⁴

According to Goodman, if a case can be made for including Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in the canon of American literature—and rightly so—then Margaret Walker's Jubilee should also be included. Because Jubilee is a fine historical novel, Goodman suggests that it can serve as an important countertext to Stowe's. Both writers present the bonding between black and white women, but Walker takes it a step further by dramatizing the ways in which women within the community are interconnected.³⁵

Minrose Gwin adds, “the peculiarly female connection in Jubilee between natural creative principles of life and spiritual creativeness synthesizes much of what is positive in women's relationships in the earlier novels and autobiographies from the South.” Gwin argues that “Walker associates womanhood as it is personified in Vyry with burgeoning growth and fertility.” She further contends that “Vyry's nurturance of white women is part of Walker's concept of creative physicality and humanism.”³⁶ In her essay “On Being Female, Black, and Free,” Walker suggests that the key to humanism lies in the traditional sphere and in the woman writer who values that sphere: “The traditional and historic role of womankind is ever the role of the healing and annealing hand, whether the outworn modes of nurse, and mother, cook, and sweetheart. As a writer these are still her concerns. These are still the stuff about which she writes, the human condition, the human potential, the human destiny.”³⁷ Gwin agrees that Vyry is such a woman and such a symbol.

In the pivotal role of the “then” and the “now” woman, this is what Walker had to say about black women in the 1980s to Kay Bonetti, 1991: “I'm very refreshed with the knowledge that Black women in the 1980s were really the key to the best literature in the country. That we had a whole group. I don't know that these women were that much influenced by Wright, because I think Wright was very chauvinistic. And I think most of the Black writers up to his time were chauvinistic. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and Sterling Brown belonged to the Harlem Renaissance, but so did Zora Neale Hurston. And she was a wonderful writer—great imagination, marvelous storyteller, and just as talented as the men, but they gave her a hard time.”³⁸

Maryemma Graham offers that “Walker is among the generation of men and women who teach and write about African-American life and culture with great pride, but whose thinking about American life and culture bear the unmistakable mark of a nascent radicalism, steeled in the Depression years, the heyday of American communism.” Graham points further to the fact that “Walker earned a reputation for her anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist sentiments, which anticipated the emergence of the New Left in the United States and Europe.” According to Graham, “Walker has an almost purist disdain for the crass materialism and societal disorientation that have become the mark of post-industrial America, remaining firm in her belief in basic human values and the intrinsic worth of man- and womankind.” Graham concludes, “I suspect it is the contradiction between Walker's adherence to certain ideals that are traditionally American and her own social radicalism that makes her critics uncomfortable with her aesthetic vision.”³⁹ Graham deduces that this may be the very reason for Walker's exclusion from the standard literary canon.

Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists (1980) commends Walker for revising her stereotypical characters to offset many of the false myths attached to them. Christian also compares Walker's presentation of the slave culture with that of Frances Harper's Iola LeRoy,⁴⁰ which Walker could hardly have acknowledged since it was unavailable. Nevertheless, Christian credits Walker with “emphasizing the practical slave culture which, in most instances, assured survival, rather than dramatizing one of shame and humiliation or great acts of heroism.” Christian further acknowledges the content and the style of Walker's Jubilee as reflecting the many stages in the development of a tradition of black women novelists. She thinks that Walker, in essence, makes space for younger novelists to create character versus type and to explore the varied dimensions of their consciousness and craft.⁴¹

Writing authoritatively about Walker's personal achievement, Jane Campbell, Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz, editors of African American Writers, believe that Jubilee and How I Wrote Jubilee, “taken as companion volumes, accentuate Walker's identification with womanhood, mothering, and healing; these two works further demonstrate how Walker's life and art are of a piece.” Campbell writes, “Celebrating her great-grandmother, Jubilee is simultaneously a paean to Walker herself, who—despite lifelong discrimination on the basis of race and gender, despite relative critical neglect, despite a negative self-image engendered by cultural animosity to diversity—has steadfastly refused to alter her vision or her image to conform to fashion.”⁴²

The history of the debate over Jubilee is something that Margaret Walker also has transcended. She has claimed her space in the United States, where she says success is spelled with a capital S and is measured by fame and fortune. As an artist, Walker writes in “Willing to Pay the Price,” she is not concerned with this kind of success. She believes that a creative worker dealing with the fiery lightning of imagination is interested in accomplishment, and she has spent her life seeking this kind of fulfillment. “As long as I live, this will be my quest; and, as such, the superficial trappings of success can have no real meaning for me. I do not really care what snide remarks my confreres make nor how searing the words of caustic critics are. Life is too short for me to concern myself with anything but the work I must do before my day is done.”⁴³

Notes

1. William L. Andrews, introduction, Six Women's Slave Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) xxx.

2. Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982) xiii.

3. Ibid. See William Wells Brown, Clotel; Or the President's Daughter (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1853); Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Knopf, 1928); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937); Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Knopf, 1974).

4. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1864; Chicago: Afro-American Press, 1969) 66-67 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

5. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974) 333.

6. Norman R. Yetman, Life Under the “Peculiar Institution”: Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) 40, 312.

7. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853-1854 with Remarks on Their Economy, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1856; New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1904) 20.

8. Maroney 493.

9. Lester Davis 258.

10. Dykeman 52.

11. Chapman 43.

12. Jeanne Noble, Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 177.

13. Ibid. 178.

14. Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants 3-4. Permission granted by Maya Angelou for use of this quotation.

15. Ibid. 4.

16. In Tate 202.

17. Ibid. 203-4.

18. Ibid. 204.

19. Ibid.

20. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, eds., Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (New York: Amistad, 1993) 119.

21. Ibid. 119-20.

22. Ibid. 120.

23. Minrose C. Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985) 161.

24. Adrianne Baytop, “Margaret Walker,” in Lina Mainiero and Langdon Lynne Faust, eds., American Women Writers (New York: Ungar, 1982) 316.

25. Eleanor Traylor, “Music As Theme: The Blues Mode in the Works of Margaret Walker,” in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers, 1950-1980 (Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984) 513.

26. Charlotte Goodman, “From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Vyry's Kitchen: The Black Female Folk Tradition in Margaret Walker's Jubilee,” in Florence Howe, ed., Tradition and the Talents of Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 335-36.

27. Temma F. Berg, “Margaret Walker's Jubilee: Refocusing William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!” Women's Studies International Forum 10.5 (1987): 31.

28. Sandi Russell, Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990) 57-58.

29. Deborah E. McDowell, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” in Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 428.

30. Ibid. 428-29.

31. Margaret Walker, “On Being Female, Black, and Free,” in Janet Sternburg, ed., The Writer on Her Work, vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 1980) 97.

32. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 411.

33. Quoted in Bonetti.

34. Goodman 336.

35. Ibid.

36. Gwin 156-57.

37. Walker, “On Being Female, Black, and Free,” 106.

38. Quoted in Bonetti.

39. Maryemma Graham, ed., preface, Margaret Walker, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays, viii-ix.

40. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980) 72.

41. Ibid. 73.

42. Campbell 464.

43. Margaret Walker, “Willing to Pay the Price,” in Stanton L. Wormley and Lewis H. Fenderson, eds., Many Shades of Black (New York: Morrow, 1969) 119.