HOW I WROTE JUBILEELD Long before Jubilee had a name I was living with it and imagining its reality. Its genesis coincides with my childhood, its development grows out of a welter of raw experiences and careful research, and its final form emerged exactly one hundred years after its major events took place. 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. Since its publication, many questions have been raised about my story. How long did it take you to write this? How much research have you done? Where did you find all this material? How much of it is fact and how much fiction? How could a woman like Vyry suffer such outrage and violence and come out of her sufferings without bitterness? Have you put the words of a Nationalist in Randall Ware's mouth? Isn't he ahead of his times? Where did you find proof of free Negroes in Georgia before the Civil War? Were you writing propaganda and deliberately slanting the issues? I hope I can satisfactorily answer these questions for those who are genuinely interested. As for those who insist on their own answers, I cannot hope to change their views. 10 Originally published by Third World Press, 1972; 1977. 79 Minna in my story was my maternal grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier. When my great-grandmother--Vyry in the story--died a month before I was born in 1915, grandmother was already in Birmingham waiting with my mother for my birth. Since my grandmother lived with us until I was an adult, it was natural throughout my formative years for me to hear stories of slave life in Georgia. We moved from Birmingham to New Orleans when I was a small child and my mother recalls how often she and my father came in from night school well past bedtime and found me enthralled in my grandmother's stories. Annoyed, she would ask, "Mama, why won't you let that child go to bed? Why will you keep her up until this time of night?" And grandmother usually answered guiltily, "Go to bed, Margaret. Go to bed right now." My father would add, "Telling her all those harrowing tales, just nothing but tall tales." Grandma grew indignant then, saying, "I'm not telling her tales; I'm telling her the naked truth." As I grew older and realized the importance of the story my grandmother was telling I prodded her with more questions: "What happened after the war, Grandma? Where did they go? Where did they live after that place?" I was already conceiving the story of Jubilee vaguely, and early in my adolescence, while I was still hearing my grandmother tell old slavery-time stories and incidents from her mother's life, I promised my grandmother that when I grew up I would write her mother's story. I'm sorry she did not live to see the book. In the Fall of 1934, when I was a senior at Northwestern 80 University in Illinois, I thought it was time to put my story on paper. I began writing my version of the Civil War, turning in sections of my manuscript to English C12 (better known as Advanced Composition or Creative Writing, under Professor E. B. Hungerford) as my weekly assignments of fifteen hundred words. After three hundred typewritten pages I realized that it did not sound right. At the same time, I was also writing a long poem that was going much better, so I put aside the prose until a more suitable time. I graduated from College to the WPA, and seven months after graduation I was working on the Writers' Project in Chicago. All kinds of writers, professional and amateur, were working on the Illinois Guidebook for WPA subsistence pay. One learned many professional tricks of the trade, if not the actual craft of writing. During those years I put aside my grandmother's story to write about the near northside of Chicago, a story about the slums where Negroes were living in increasing numbers during those last years of the thirties. Sooner than I realized, three years had passed, and in 1939 Congress passed a law saying all boondogglers were wasting the Government's money and must get off the WPA if they had been employed for as many as eighteen months. I discovered I was a boondoggler and must get off the Government's payroll, and I vowed not to go back to the Project when the necessary interim period of unemployment expired. Instead, I decided I must go back to graduate school and work toward a Master's degree in 81 English so that I could go South and teach in a college. wanted more than anything else to write, but as my father warned me, I would have to eat if I wanted to live, and writing poetry would not feed me. I knew from experience that I would not make a good newspaperwoman, and I could not free-lance and live in the bohemian world. Both worlds produce excellent writers, but by then it was clear that with three generations of forebears who had taught school, I was not going to be able to escape my traditional academic background. (I have now been in the teaching harness for twenty-seven years and as much as I love the profession I have always rationalized that it was only a means to an end, since the chief goal of my life was to be a writer.) I went to the University of Iowa and studied at the Writers' Workshop there. I wanted my Master's thesis to be the Civil War story of my family, but once again my poetry was chosen. Nevertheless, it was at Iowa that I began the long period of research for Jubilee. I enrolled in a course in American Civilization and was instructed to do three things: (1) Compile and read a long list of books about the South, the Negro during slavery, and the Slave Codes in Georgia (such books include Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery; William E. Dodd, The Cotton Kingdom; Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South; Frederick Olmstead, Journey in the Seaboard Slave State; and Frances A. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georaian Plantation in 1838-1839); (2) Make a thorough study of a Negro woman of the ante-bellum period; and (3) Learn how to find and 82 use primary sources and documents. I set myself immediately to the first task, reading Civil War stories and history books. These history books were divided into three classes according to their viewpoints: (1) history from the Southern white point of view, (2) history from the Northern white viewpoint, and (3) history from the Negro viewpoint. I was trained as a child in the South to read books at school from the Southern viewpoint and books at home from the Negro viewpoint. Once I was out of the South I read more and more from the Northern viewpoint. It was amazing to discover how widely these history books differed. For instance, Southern historians claimed slavery was a beneficial system with benign masters; Northerners did not oppose slavery as long as it was "contained" in the South and did not spread into the territories; while Negro historians regarded slavery as a cruel, inhuman system. White Southerners claimed they fought a war between the states for Independence; white Northerners claimed it was a rebellion of the Southerners against the Union, and Negroes said it was a war of liberation. White Southerners claimed Reconstruction was the est page in history and a tragic era with Negro rule, while Northerners blamed the troubles of that period on the death of Lincoln, on Andrew Johnson, and on ignorant Negroes and Congress. On the other hand, Negroes claimed it was an age of progress with universal suffrage, land reform, and the first public school system. Then the Ku Klux Klan intimidated and disfranchised Negroes in the 83 counter-revolution to re-establish white home rule. As for Negro rule, my authors reminded me that Negroes were never majority office holders in any state. Faced with these three conflicting viewpoints, a novelist in the role of social historian finds it difficult to maintain an "objective" point of view. Obviously she must choose one or the other--or create her own. Three years passed before I could get beyond the first historical task assigned to me at Iowa, for I left the University in 1940 with my M.A. degree and my thesis, the poems, For MY People. Then in. 1942, when For My People was published, I visited the Schomburg Collection of Negro History on 135th Street in Harlem for the first time. I found Lawrence Reddick serving as Curator of that collection and we renewed a family friendship that dated from his days as professor of history at Dillard University in New Orleans. With his doctorate in history he proved an able teacher of Southern history and gave me excellent leads to Georgia's laws on Negroes. Our friendship and association continue to this day. In 1944 I received a Rosenwald Fellowship to begin serious research on Jubilee. (This came just as I was expecting my first child, so my work was delayed and somewhat handicapped.) At that time I was seeking information about free Negroes in Georgia as well as about my ante-bellum slave woman.