Jubilee/Margaret Walker Margaret Walker: A Creative Survivor

Jubilee was the crowning an achievement of Margaret Walker's career. A sprawling novel about Civil War-era blacks, the novel is simultaneously a preservation of Walker's family history and a historically accurate portrayal of slavery life for many blacks of the times.

On a more personal level, the novel is a testament to Walker as a creative survivor, which she discusses in her essay "How I Wrote Jubilee." The essay shows Margaret Walker as a creative survivor in three ways. First, though her dedication and diligence she kept the Jubilee project alive over a span of many years, fighting adversity, setbacks and practical concerns to finish the project and allow her creative vision to survive. Secondly, Jubilee is the representation of the survival of Walker's heritage; the novel is her creative way of preserving not only the history of her family but also the history of black Americans in the face of historical whitewashing. Finally, in "How I Wrote Jubilee" Walker shows how important the creative process is to her own personal survival; it is the lens through which she sees the world and without her creative outlets, she herself could not survive.

The novel Jubilee seemed to come to fruition in spite of many forces that seemed to doom the project to failure, and in fact, its very existence is an example of Walker's determination to keep her creativity alive.

The first obstacle came when Walker was in graduate school and wanted to make the Jubilee project her masters thesis, "but once again my poetry was chosen" (Walker 52). Having problems with the writing of Jubilee, walker time and again turned to her poetry as her main creative focus throughout school. Later, these problems arose again while she was at Yale as a Ford Fellow.

By the beginning of May I had two hundred pages of manuscript, but...

I knew what it was but did not know how to correct it. So I left Yale with Professor Pearson's criticism in my ears: 'You are telling the story but it does not come alive.' (Walker 57)
Despite this setback, Walker continues and never gave up on her project, even though she began to doubt herself and whether it would ever be finished. She overcame practical problems with trying to finish her Ph.D. And writing 135 pages worth of seminar papers (Walker 59), but finally, in 1964 she turned again to the novel full time. During a five-week vacation with her children, she "rewrote and revised again the two hundred pages of the manuscript that covered the antebellum section" (Walker 59). Later, in 1965 she successfully completed the other sections of the book, and "on the morning of April 9, 1965, at ten o'clock, I was typing the last words [...] and I was grateful to God and everybody who had seen me through to that moment" (Walker 61).

Thus, Walker overcame not only her own creative limitations in writing Jubilee, but she also dealt with personal problems (surgeries for both Walker and her husband), the demands of finishing her doctorate, and of course, meeting the needs of her children. She did this through pure perseverance and dedication: "People ask me how I find time to write, with a family and a teaching job. I don't. That is one reason I was so long with Jubilee [...] It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write" (Walker 61). Yes, Walker went beyond human possibility and found the time and resources to finish Jubilee, and for that she can effectively be considered a creative survivor.

Walker as a creative survivor is also evident in the fact that the project itself is a way…