"Here in 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 antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Jubilee is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter. Weaving her family's oral history with thirty years of research, Walker has brought the true and everyday experiences of slaves to millions of readers around the world, black and white, young and old. Jubilee churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history." -- Publisher's description