Margaret Walker: Creative Survival and Jubilee's Legacy

Introduction: Walker as a Creative Survivor

Jubilee was the crowning achievement of Margaret Walker's career. A sprawling novel about Civil War-era Black Americans, it is simultaneously a preservation of Walker's family history and a historically accurate portrayal of slavery as experienced by Black people of that era.

On a more personal level, the novel is a testament to Walker as a creative survivor, a quality she discusses in her essay "How I Wrote Jubilee." The essay reveals Walker as a creative survivor in three distinct ways. First, through her dedication and diligence, she kept the Jubilee project alive over a span of many years, fighting adversity, setbacks, and practical concerns to finish it and allow her creative vision to survive. Second, Jubilee represents the survival of Walker's heritage — her creative way of preserving not only the history of her own 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 endure.

Perseverance and the Long Road to Completion

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

The first obstacle arose when Walker was in graduate school and wanted to make the Jubilee project her master's thesis, "but once again my poetry was chosen" (Walker 52). Struggling with the writing of Jubilee, Walker time and again turned to her poetry as her main creative focus throughout her schooling. 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 in working with Professor Holmes Pearson, we discovered what I had suspected during my last year at Northwestern: I had a major flaw in my fiction. 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 never gave up on her project, even as she began to doubt herself and whether it would ever be finished. She overcame practical challenges — including completing her Ph.D. and writing 135 pages of seminar papers (Walker 59) — and finally, in 1964, she returned 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). In 1965 she successfully completed the remaining sections, 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).

Walker overcame not only her own creative limitations in writing Jubilee, but also personal hardships — surgeries for both herself and her husband — the demands of finishing her doctorate, and the responsibilities of motherhood. She accomplished this through pure perseverance: "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). Walker went beyond what seemed humanly possible and found the time and resources to finish Jubilee, and for that she can rightly be considered a creative survivor.

Preserving Family History Through Fiction

Walker as a creative survivor is also evident in the fact that the project itself was a means of preserving the author's own history and that of her family.

From the beginning, the novel was a labor of love. Walker's inspiration to write it had more to do with her love for her family than anything else: "Most of my life I have been involved with writing this story about my great-grandmother, and even if Jubilee were never considered an artistic or commercial success I would still be happy just to have finished it" (Walker 50). The story was intensely personal, and Walker believed it was her duty to preserve the oral history that had been passed down from her great-grandmother.

The roots of that commitment ran deep. From a young age, Walker was captivated by the stories her grandmother told — stories passed down from her own mother — and she made a promise that those stories would not be lost:

"As I grew older and realized the importance of the story my grandmother was telling, I prodded her with more questions [...] I was already conceiving of the story of Jubilee vaguely, and early in my adolescence [...] I promised my grandmother that when I grew up I would write her mother's story." (Walker 51)

Walker's grandmother did not live to see the book completed, but Walker kept her promise. Jubilee became her creative means of ensuring that family history survived.

Works Cited

Walker, Margaret. "How I Wrote Jubilee."