Jubilee, Margaret Walker

This was a really moving book, based on a true story of the author's ancestors. It is about the time of slavery in the South in the mid 19th century. The heroine is a mulatto girl named Vyry, the daughter of the white plantation owner and a black slave. I liked how the main character was a black slave girl, the lowest among the low in the Southern hierarchy. She's female and black, but courageous and brave. Walker weaved her family's oral history with thirty years of research, and she has created a great story. The book spans from the 1840s past the civil war. Jubilee chronicles the harsh brutality of slavery, and the way slaves were mistreated and abused, and how white people thought that slavery "was better for the blacks" because they "couldn't take care of themselves." It makes my blood boil.
Also, even after the Civil War was over and slavery abolished, blacks were still mistreated- perhaps even more than when they had their owners protecting them. I'm not sure about that, but horrible massacres occurred; many innocent people were killed, though not Vyry. Her house, however, was burned to the ground by the Klu Klux Klan. I really liked this book, and hope to read more of Margaret Walker in the future. 497 pages, 4.75 stars.