Jubilee Margaret Walker Chapter Summary

Margaret Walker made a resolution that she would depict the realistic, anti-Gone with the Wind version of slave culture within her novel Jubilee, no matter how many years and decades of research and writing it took her (Pettis 13). As many critics have mentioned, by focusing on the practical, unheroized lives of slaves as well as on the folk tradition that helped the slave community maintain a level of self-respect through a world that constantly tried to rip every shred of dignity from them, Walker told the forgotten narrative through the official history of the South, that of the slave who was only trying to wake up alive every morning (Cataliotti 187). In Jubilee, Margaret Walker recreates the unique culture of the slave community through the use of folk tradition, such as epigraphs, song, and knowledge of the land, along with the focus …show more content…
Epigraphs are used in Jubilee to preface each chapter with a direct connection to the oral folk tradition of the African American culture (Cataliotti 188). These epigraphs are placed at the beginning of every chapter by Walker to give the reader a brief synopsis as to the events of that chapter. For instance, the epigraph at the beginning of chapter six reads “Marse John’s dinner party” (Margaret Walker 70) and as expected, there is a dinner party within that chapter, Vyry remarks that it is one of the largest she had ever seen while living at the Dutton plantation (Margaret Walker 72). The unique characteristic of Walker’s epigraphs is that each one speaks directly to the circumstances of the chapter, some as straight forward as the one in chapter six, while also pulling together a connection with African American folk sayings and songs. While chapter six is entirely about the dinner party at the big house, the saying Walker placed above the epigraph exclaims “I’m gwine sit at the welcome table, some of these