Why Margaret Walker wrote Jubilee

The past is never dead.  It's not even past.  William Faulkner

I wanted to tell the story that my grandmother had told me, and to set the record straight where Black people are concerned in terms of the Civil War, of slavery, segregation and Reconstruction.  I believe that the role of the novelist can be, and largely is for me, the role of a historian.  More people will read fiction than will history, and history is slanted just as fiction may seem to be.  People will learn about a time and a place through a historical novel.

--Margaret Walker, "Poetry, History, and History".

Jubilee is a bedtime story of truth, of black historical truth, repeated time and time again by a grandmother who refused to forget the painful black past and the courageous black people who lived it.  Margaret Walker's grandmother motivated her to write the story of Randall and Vyry Ware, a true story set during Civil War and Reconstruction in the American South.