The best-selling classic about a mixed-race child in the Civil War–era South that “chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage” (New York Times Book Review).

Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the antebellum South in both its opulence and its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction.

Weaving her own family’s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light in a novel that churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history.

“A revelation.”—Milwaukee Journal

Includes a Foreword by Nikki Giovanni