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Informationen zum Autor MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998) was one of America's most popular and respected African American writers and scholars. She first gained national recognition with the 1942 poetry collection For My People , a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel Jubilee , which became a national bestseller. Among the most formidable literary voices to emerge in the twentieth century, she will be remembered as one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage. Klappentext A 50th anniversary edition of Margaret Walker's best-selling classic with a foreword by Nikki Giovanni Chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage. "New York Times Book Review Jubilee "tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress.Vyry bears witness to the South s antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction.Weaving her own family s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker s novel brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light."Jubilee "churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history." I: Sis Hetta’s Child The Ante-Bellum Years 1 Death is a mystery that only the squinch owl knows “May Liza, how come you so restless and uneasy? You must be restless in your mind.” “I is. I is. That old screech owl is making me nervous.” “Wellum, ’tain’t no use in your gitting so upsot bout that bird hollering. It ain’t the sign of no woman nohow. It always means a man.” “It’s the sign of death.” Grandpa Tom, the stable boy, and May Liza, Marster’s upstairs house girl, were sitting on the steps of their cabins in the slave Quarters. It was not yet dusk-dark. An early twilight hung over the valley, and along the creek bank fog rose. The hot Spring day was ending with the promise of a long and miserable night. A hushed quiet hung over the Quarters. There were no children playing ring games before the cabins. The hardened dirt-clay road, more like a narrow path before their doors, was full of people smoking corncob pipes and chewing tobacco in silence. Out on the horizon a full moon was rising. All eyes were on the cabin of Sis Hetta, where she lay on her deathbed sinking fast. Inside Sis Hetta’s cabin the night was sticky hot. A cloying, sweetish, almost sickening smell of Cape jessamine, honeysuckle, and magnolias clung heavily to the humid night air. Caline, a middle-aged brown-skin woman with a head of crinkly brown hair tied in a knot on her neck, imposing eyes, and the unruffled air of importance and dignity that one associated with house servants, stood beside the sickbed and fanned Sis Hetta with a large palmetto fan. Caline knew Hetta was dying. As soon as supper was over in the Big House, Caline came to see what she could do. Aunt Sally, cook in the Big House, couldn’t get away with Caline but she sent word, “Tell em I’ll be along terreckly.” Fanning Sis Hetta in the hot night seemed all there was left to do for her, and so Caline kept fanning and thinking: Sis Hetta was a right young woman, younger than Caline, and she got with all those younguns fast as she could breed them. Caline had no children. She had never known why. Maybe it was something Old Marster made them do to her when she was a young girl and first started working in the Big House. Maybe it was the saltpeter. Anyway, Caline was glad. Slaves were better off, like herself, when they had no children to be sold away, to die, and to keep on having till they killed you, like Hetta was dying now. Out on the Big Road, May Liza and Grandpa Tom could barely discern a man in the distance. As he drew nearer they could see he was riding a small child on his shoulders.
