Book Description
Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (36)

Great read
This book is definately one of all-time favorite reads. I could not put it down, and when I did, I almost wanted to cry because it was over. It was as if I had grown with this woman, experienced everything with her, and the ending of the book put a direct end to our relationship. Not very many books move me in such a way.
I think it was well-written...had it not been I wouldn't have been so emotionally-tied to the characters.
I recommend this book to everyone-hopefully it will move you as much as it has moved myself.

Add this one to the Literary Canon
This is a beautiful piece of literature taken from the history books. It takes you on a journey from slavery through reconstruction into the start of what would become Jim Crow. The characters are vivid and this could easily be the story of any number of African American families.

Voices of the Old South
I was 13 years old when I read *Jubilee* for the first time.I found it in the library and spent a rainy Saturday devouring the story.After the last page was turned, I ran immediately to my grandmother (who was born in 1906, and therefore an expert in all things old) and asked her how any of this could possibly be true.I knew about slavery from history books, but slave masters having children with slaves!What followed was an eye-opening conversation about what our history REALLY was - and who the people of the south really were.I never forgot the experience, and I never forgot the book.

Now, I am 18 years older, and once again, on a rainy Saturday, I picked up a copy of *Jubillee* (this time from Square Books in Oxford) and read the whole book again.The story was still as powerful, and I understood so much more than I could back then.I understood the mastery of Walker's writing, the power of her story, and the incredible fairness and depth with which Walker crafted her novel.So many voices of the South speak to us . . .

The chief voice is of course Vyry's - it's her story.She is the voice of forgiveness, compassion, fairness, and spirituality that reaches to so many.She is also a voice that triumphs over the horrible suffering and injustice of the pre-Civil War South.She endures Emancipation and Reconstruction - not quite the panacea of those history books that led me astray so young - and ultimately triumphs over hate in all its forms.Her words concerning misunderstanding and reconciliation in the closing 4 chapters of the novel are some of the most powerful words in literature.She is a heroine among heroines - a beautiful example of what it means for humanity to triumph over prejudice and adversity.Alone, it would be a great tale, but the voices don't stop with Vyry alone . . .

Each of the characters speaks for a class of those who grew up in the South:the angry poor-whites (Grimes, the people who burn Vyry and Innis out of their home), the angry black men (Randall Ware, Jim to an extent), the privileged and cruel white upper class (Big Missy Salina), those among the white upper class who felt the injustice and yet were too cowardly to enact change (Marster Dutton and Miss Lillian), the freedom fighters that worked diligently to bring freedom (Brother Zeke), those who suffered before they saw the promised land (Mammy Sukey, Aunt Sally), and those who wanted to turn the labor that had been stolen for so long into proof of their worth (Innis Brown).Not only are all these voices present, but they are treated with equal sympathy and truth.Even the most evil of characters, like Grimes, is presented with compassion.Even the most heroic of characters, like Randall Ware, is portrayed with human frailties in tact.This is what makes *Jubilee* not just another slave novel, but a novel that really makes history alive.

I am a descendant of the poor white class.What *Jubilee* proved to me as a child was simple:I shared more with people of color than I thought.What it proves to me now is no less profound:Our history and our heritage are bound together by threads that we may not understand, and yet they are undeniable.Perhaps Vyry said it best:we all need each other.Only when we as a nation and a people realize that truth can true healing take place.

A must read
This book was assigned reading for my daughters college literature class. She kept her copy, I read it and wanted a copy for myself. It is excellent.

Jubilee
A tremendous story of one woman's determinationto survive. This is a no-glory novel, with deep emotions and awe inspiring human spirit. The dignity with which Vyry lives her life is as relevant today as the time period depicted. There is more than one lesson to learn in this classic novel. ... Read more

Book Description
In June 1867, the San Francisco Elevator---one of thenation's premier black weekly newspapers during Reconstruction---beganpublishing articles by a Californian calling herself "Ann J. Trask" andlater "Semper Fidelis."Her name was Jennie Carter (1830-1881), and theElevator would print her essays, columns, and poems for sevenyears.

Carter probably spent her early life in New Orleans, New York, andWisconsin, but by the time she wrote her "Always Faithful" columns for thenewspaper, she was in Nevada County, California. Her work considersCalifornia and national politics, race and racism, women's rights andsuffrage, temperance, morality, education, and a host of other issues, allfrom the point of view of an unabashedly strong-minded African Americanwoman.

Recovering Carter's work from obscurity, this volume represents one of themost exciting bodies of extant work by an African American journalistbefore the twentieth century.Editor Eric Gardner provides an introductionthat documents as much of Carter's life in California as can be known andplaces her work in historical and literary context. ... Read more

Book Description
Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture examines popular culture's reliance on long-standing stereotypes of black men as animalistic, hypersexual, dangerous criminals, whose bodies, dress, actions, attitudes, and language both repel and attract white audiences. Author Linda G. Tucker studies this trope in the images of well-known African American men in four cultural venues: contemporary literature, black-focused films, sports commentary, and rap music.

Through rigorous analysis, the book argues that American popular culture's representations of black men preserve racial hierarchies that imprison blacks both intellectually and physically. Of equal importance are the ways in which black men battle against, respond to, and become implicated in the production and circulation of these images.

Tucker cites examples ranging from Michael Jordan's underwear commercials and the popular Barbershop movies, to the career of rapper Tupac Shakur and John Edgar Wideman's memoir Brothers and Keepers. Lockstep and Dance tracks the continuity between historical images of African American men, the peculiar constitution of whites' anxieties about black men, and black men's tolerance of and resistance to the reproduction of such images. The legacy of these stereotypes is still apparent in contemporary advertising, film, music, and professional basketball. Lockstep and Dance argues persuasively that these cultural images reinforce the idea of black men as prisoners of American justice and of their own minds but also shows how black men struggle against this imprisonment. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Well worth reading
The other review posted so far for this work resorts to ad hominem attacks on Tucker and does readers the disservice of a review so distasteful, they might accidentally hold the critic's words against this text.

Dr. Tucker's insights into such interesting topics as advertising and athletics required extensive research--and her approach is thoughtful and intelligent.Her work will likely strike a cord with anyone interested in the fields of popular culture or African American studies.I sincerely hope that Tucker turns her academic lens toward African American women; such a work would further the strides that _Lockstep and Dance_ makes as it explores what black and white mean in visual and verbal representations in the U.S.

Pure garbage
This woman was an instructor at the Arkansas University where I was also employed. I read portions of this several years ago. It was a tremendous waste of time. Her syllabus read like something out of an asylum. Did a vanity press publish this drivel?? ... Read more

Book Description
In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short stories, and dramatized in fictional form the cultural theories expressed in his essay collections Shadow & Act and Going to the Territory.

In Shadowing Ralph Ellison, John Wright traces Ellison's intellectual and aesthetic development, and the evolution of his cultural philosophy, throughout his long career. The book explores Ellison's published fiction, his criticism and correspondence, and his passionate exchanges with—and impact on—other literary intellectuals during the Cold War 1950s and during the Culture Wars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Wright examines Ellison's body of work through the lens of Ellison's cosmopolitan philosophy of art and culture, which the writer began to construct during the late 1930s.Ellison, Wright argues, eschewed orthodoxy in both political and cultural discourse, maintaining that to achieve the highest cultural awareness and the greatest personal integrity, the individual must cultivate forms of thinking and acting that are fluid, improvisational, and vitalistic—like the blues and jazz.Accordingly, Ellison elaborated throughout his body of work the innumerable ways that rigid cultural labels, categories, and concepts—from racial stereotypes and fashionable academic theories to conventional political doctrines—fail to capture the full potential of human consciousness. Instead, Ellison advocated forms of consciousness and culture akin to what the blues and jazz reveal; and he portrayed those musical traditions as the best embodiment of the evolving American spirit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book is a great book for Black Literature.
This book focuses on a young girl name Vyry who has to face many choicesin life. First the death of her mother. Then this mean old 18th centurydevil Selina. She experiencesmany people like her first love RandallWare, and Innis Brown. She has to make a choice between these men. ... Read more

Book Description
This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility" that express our identities, values, and connections to others in socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating forms of socially entrenched bias.Responsible ethical theory should reveal and question the moral significance of social differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Extending ethical horizons
In Moral Understandings, Margaret Urban Walker not only powerfully argues the case for a feminist ethics of responsibility, but in so doing extends the implications beyond feminism. Viewing moral responsibility from various socially and culturally situated contexts seems common sense enough to all, accept those whoimagine themselves to be in some transcendent position, epistemologically speaking.

What I get from reading Walker is not the idea that we should be reading off ethics from these various positions in the sense of doing the usual (traditional) ethics from many vantage points. That would be relativism. Rather, it seems to me that Walker is arguing that we should be responding from these positions. For Walker, moral responsibility is more an expressive and collaborative exercise than the traditional theoretical activity which focuses only on decision-making. It is this practice of responsibility that maintains the other-directedness of ethics embedded in social and cultural context.

For me, the most surprising aspect of Walker's book has been that so many of my applied ethics research students have found it useful in grounding their work in fields as diverse as disability, vulnerable identities, nursing ethics, GM foods, biotechnology, welfare ethics, and community development.

Soggy relativism
The book rehashes ethical relativism.It tries to bring in some trendy takes on power, feminism, and Foucauld, but it just commits the relativistic fallacy over and over.Author seems unaware of logicalcontradictions. ... Read more

Book Description

The hardcover publication of this work resulted in a landmark case, Ellen Wright v. Warner Books Inc. and Margaret Walker.The court ruled in favor of Walker and Warner Books Inc. in a precedent setting opinion.The court's decision, as well as the opinion of the presiding judges is included in this volume.

Customer Reviews (2)

Real Thoughts
This book was hard to keep up with at first I thought it was a biography on Richard Wright.After reading and really getting into the book I then realized that she had a right to speak and write of their relationship. Ifelt that the book was informative and helpful in understanding a differentside of Richard Wright. Everybody has more than one side to them.

With Friends Like These....
Richard Wright, author of NATIVE SON, BLACK BOY, and THE OUTSIDER, is a major American writer.He desrves a major biography.

RICHARD WRIGHT: DAEMONIC GENIUS by Margaret Walker is more like a major hatchet-job.

Dr.Walker is a noted author in her own right, with the bestseller JUBILEE toher credit.She was also friendly with Langston Hughes, Frank Yerby, andJames Baldwin.And she had a three-and-a-half year friendship with Wrighthimself, beginning in 1936.

Much of DAEMONIC GENIUS is based uponWalker's memories of that relationship.That the friendship ended badly(according to Walker, due to Wright) seems to be the central theme of thebook.It's also its central fault.

Walker spends pages and pagesdescribing her feelings over the break up.She then analyzes everyrelationship Wright ever had in the light of those feelings.Along theway, she sprinkles in biographical passages almost as an afterthought.Ifyour interest is in Walker's perspective on Wright's psyche and how itaffected his work, this might be fine.If you're interested in anobjective presentation of Wright's life and work, you will find Walker'spontifications downright annoying.It might even occur to you that Walkeris getting even with the man for some perceived wrong 30 years after hisdeath.

Such are Walker's feelings about Wright that she seemsinconsistent in her conclusions.The first few chapters of her book glossover Wright's upbringing by referring to BLACK BOY, implying that the 1945work covers those years authoritatively.Yet when she comes to discuss thebook itself, she describes it as, "not a book of purely factual andverifiable incidents."There are many such paradoxes in thenarrative.

Too, Walker details many unkind psycholgical insights aboutWright's widow, Ellen.Much has been made of the fact that Ellen tried toput a stop to Walker's book through court action, claiming violation ofcopyright.I personally think she could have made a better case forcharacter assassination.

In short, then, the definitive biography ofRichard Wright has yet to be written.And students of Wright wouldprobably be better off giving RICHARD WRIGHT: DAEMONIC GENIUS a pass. ... Read more

Book Description
Daisy Bates (1914-1999) has long been renowned as the mentor of the Little Rock Nine, the first African Americans to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For her work guiding the Nine through one of the most tumultuous civil rights crises of the 1950s, she was selected as 1957 Woman of the Year in Education by the Associated Press, and was the only woman invited to speak at the Lincoln Memorial ceremony in Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. But her importance as a historical figure has been overlooked by scholars of the civil rights movement.

Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas chronicles her childhood, her marriage, her co-founding of the Arkansas State Press with her husband L.C. Bates, and her political advocacy before, during, and well after the Central High School crisis. An orphan from the southern Arkansas mill town of Huttig, she eventually rose to the zenith of civil rights action in the South. In 1952, she was elected president of the NAACP in Arkansas and traveled the country speaking on civil rights and political issues. During the 1960s and 1970s, she worked as a field organizer for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson to get out the black vote. Even after a series of strokes, she continued her work, orchestrating the affairs of numerous self-help and economic initiatives in Arkansas.

Using interviews, archival records, contemporary newspaper accounts, and other materials, author Grif Stockley reconstructs Bates's life and career, revealing her to be a complex, contrary leader of the civil rights movement. Her struggles with family, marriage, and community leaders are given the nuanced treatment they deserve. Ultimately, Daisy Bates paints a vivid portrait of an ardent, overlooked advocate of social justice. ... Read more

Book Description
Representing an international gathering of scholars, Fields Watered with Blood constitutes the first critical assessment of the full scope of Margaret Walker's literary career. As they discuss Walker's work, including the landmark poetry collection For My People and the novel Jubilee, the contributors reveal the complex interplay of concerns and themes in Walker's writing: folklore and prophecy, place and space, history and politics, gender and race. In addition, the contributors remark on how Walker's emphases on spirituality and on dignity in her daily life make themselves felt in her writings and show how Walker's accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, activist, mother, and family elder influenced what and how she wrote.

A brief biography, an interview with literary critic Claudia Tate, a chronology of major events in Walker's life, and a selected bibliography round out this collection, which will do much to further our understanding of the writer whom poet Nikki Giovanni once called "the most famous person nobody knows." ... Read more

Book Description
Word count: 4678. ... Read more